Bug#499914: ffmpeg: when packaging svn snapshots, please use svn _revision_ instead of date!

[Loïc Minier]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008, Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
>  Erm, google ratings never were a really good reasoning or argument for
> anything, they are just good for one thing: people like repeating stuff
> and often don't think about them.

 Uh this is not about random google ratings, it's about what your peers
 have decided to do in their packages.

> >  I think dates are useful as well.
>  Like mentioned above, dates aren't unique. There were 7 commits done to
> the ffmpeg svn on that day, so it's not really clear which revision the
> date refers to ...

 The interpretation of dates by subversion is not to pick a random
 commit in the day.

>  So it was exactly the last commit from the day before that was used
> here? No commit from the day included? Furthermore, I wonder, wouldn't
> that approach have a timezone issue and maybe get you different
> revisions when being in different timezones?

 These are problems of interpretation of dates which are subversion's to
 solve.


 Anyway, nothing specific to ffmpeg here; the only specific thing is
 that we need to fix the documentation in copyright.

 I for one would become a standardized way to version our packages
 coming out of various repositories.  I understand why you think
 revisions would make more sense to you, but I also like the human
 readable nature of dates which tell me how old a snapshot is and allow
 me to answer questions like "is this new upstream release more recent
 or older than the snapshot in Debian?" without poking the upstream SVN,
 or crawling the Debian changelog.


   Cheers,
-- 
Loïc Minier