[mythtv-users] protocol version mismatch, what's the best solution?

[Isaac Richards]

On Tuesday 03 October 2006 4:14 pm, Richard Freeman wrote:
> Isaac Richards wrote:
> > How exactly do you propose to deal with different package maintainers
> > packaging different bits of (unreleased, pulled from svn) code?  If I
> > were put out 0.20.1 right now from the fixes branch, that won't change
> > the situation at all.
>
> I'm guessing what he was thinking is that if ALL 0.20 branches in svn
> used the same protocol, and that when a protocol-change is needed it got
> tagged as a dev release then package maintainers would not use those
> builds.  

The (unreleased by me) 0.20-fixes branch in SVN uses the same protocol version 
as trunk does.  Not sure what you're referring to by 'ALL 0.20 branches in 
svn'.  There's only one 0.20 branch, and there haven't been any releases from 
it after the original 0.20.

> If 0.20 suffers from numerous bugs and a bugfix release is 
> needed it could be tagged 0.20.1 or 0.21.  Package maintainers should be
> discouraged from pulling from SVN - rather there should be dot releases
> more frequently for them to target.  At least, that was the impression I
> got reading the thread.

It's generally a good idea to pull from fixes for the packages, but the people 
doing the packaging still have to be paying attention.  I probably wouldn't 
have released packages right away with the protocol change in them.

> Not sure if all that is really necessary, but it probably wouldn't hurt
> to keep the protocol version identical in all non-internal-dev releases.

And it is.  There hasn't been a release with the new protocol version yet.

> Sure, in an ideal world we run the same distro of linux on every one of
> our boxes, but sometimes it is nice to be able to use different distros
> on different boxes, and it would be nice if 0.20 on Fedora talked to
> 0.20 on Gentoo and 0.20 on Knoppmyth and 0.20 on Minimyth.  From the
> user's standpoint they ARE using the same version - it is just that 0.20
> describes about 75 different builds and counting...  :)
>
> Maybe one solution is to loudly advertise the build number somewhere
> prominent - so that users can see they're really running version
> 0.20.12857 and not 0.20.12856.  That and documenting what builds would
> be ideal for distros to standardize on for interoperability...

The build number is included in builds from SVN, but cannot be included in 
external ones.  I would hope package maintainers put the revision they 
decided to use in their package names somewhere.

My main point is that if I were to release 0.20.1 right this very instant, 
there'd still be people trying to run it against 0.20 packages out there.

Isaac