Updates on working towards a new Debian package for ess

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

[ Continuing to spam poor Peter G. ... ]

On 18 May 2008 at 23:53, Stefan Theussl wrote:
| > I am confused. I thought the refcard issue was fixed in svn by Martin as per
| >
| >    r3888 | maechler | 2008-05-16 04:55:32 -0500 (Fri, 16 May 2008) | 3 lines
| >
| >    Usepackage {fullpage} instead of {a4};
| >    {svn} is now also carried by ubuntu
| >
| > What did you change relative to this?
| >   
| Actually, nothing. I just thought it would be better to release the 
| latest upstream release than the current development version. I know 
| that Martin already fixed this. The refcard.tex I changed was just the 
| one from the ess.orig.tar.gz which in turn was generated from the tagged 
| 5.3.7 release.

I see. I sort-of figured it out from your tarball.  And that did not give me
a warm and fuzzy feeling. As far as I can tell, we did our bug triage
relative to the SVN, we did the test releases relative to the SVN, and we
tested relative to the SVN.  All of a sudden I saw a (arguably small) set of
diffs without explanation given ...

| >> You can download it from:
| >>
| >> http://statmath.wu-wien.ac.at/~theussl/downloads/ess.org.tar.gz

[Btw: the name is $package-$version.orig.tar.gz. not .org.tar.gz ]

| > I think I'd be more comfortable sticking with svn given that it would
| > be clearer exactly what code we released off.
| >
| > It is not uncommon to release Debian package from svn. We could call
| > this 5.3.7.svn3892. In a way, that would be more honest than calling a
| > snapshot 5.3.7 when there really is a 5.3.7 release.
| >   
| Ok, sounds good to me.

Thinking about this more today, I feel even more that we should simply
release what we currently have in SVN, but call it

	5.3.8~svn3892

The ~ sorts lower in Debian, so a package 5.3.8-1 will cleanly replace
this. I do the same with R pre-releases (alpha/beta/rc)

That way nothing needs to be modified from the svn tree.

Now, as I am new here, I would like to hear from the ESS guys on the list:

 -- is the current SVN fit for releases ?
 -- are you comfortable seeing it in Debian, or
 -- would you rather that we took 5.3.7 as it was ?

As I argued before, pre-releases are pretty standard in Debian for many
parts, including (or even in particular) the main GNU toolchain.   

Thanks for any feedback!

Dirk

-- 
Three out of two people have difficulties with fractions.