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

[Loïc Minier]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008, Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
>  But do they have decided because they thought about it, or followed by
> repeating stuff?

 You seem to be assuming that they didn't think about it.  Clearly,
 that's not our case, and it's not a very nice thing to assume of your
 peers.  Our choice is good enough and the simplest to implement.

>  It's not obvious to users trying to look for what version the checkout
> was. Maybe noting down in README.source how the specific dated checkout
> was produced would be helpful in that respect.

 This is all subversion specific; if you care about checking "what
 SVN revision is this date-based snapshot using", then you are educated
 enough to look it up in the SVN manual, or to run svn info.

> > >  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.
>  Erm, so you rather like to push off the traceability requirements of
> where and how the upstream version was received to an "interpretation"
> of a tool rather to use proper informations that you actually have at
> your hands? Nice call, really userfriendly.  :/

 It's not an "interpretation", it's engineering and reproducible.  And
 there is nothing user related here, users don't need to know which /SVN
 revision/ was used, if they need to check whether a feature is
 supported they can check with ffmpeg itself, which by the way also
 tells which revision was used...

> >  Anyway, nothing specific to ffmpeg here; the only specific thing is
> >  that we need to fix the documentation in copyright.
>  ... and make sure with that that people in different timezones trying
> to get the same upstream source that you package won't fail with that
> approach.

 So propose a patch to set the timezone before calling svn during
 get-orig-source?  You're really making up problems here, the packagers
 knows what he is getting when he prepares the tarball.

> >  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.
>  The only thing here is that a date is ambigious with most VCSes when
> not also adding time (and timezone) informations to it, so it doesn't
> gain you too much.

 So help us set or provide or avoid TZ?


 Again, nothing ffmpeg specific here; check the archive, see how many
 dates are used.  Do everybody a favor and do the discussion at the
 project or policy level.

-- 
Loïc Minier