[Rd] Allow semantic versioning for packages

[Simon Urbanek]

Gabor,

what you propose is not really feasible, because R relies on the fact that it can meaningfully order the the versions as to determine the update order. If you use arbitrary strings then ordering becomes random - that's why git commit hashes are so useless for this purpose. The fact that you are forced to use something meaningful is for a good reason here.

Cheers,
Simon


On Oct 4, 2013, at 8:53 PM, Gábor Csárdi <csardi.gabor at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear R developers,
> 
> (http://bugs.r-project.org/ seems to be down, so I am writing a feature
> request here.)
> 
> It would be great to allow semantic version numbers for packages. See
> http://semver.org/ for details.
> 
> The problem I am having is that I am setting up a nightly build server, and
> there is no easy way to create a version number for builds that are in
> between releases.
> 
> Ideally I would use something like
> 
> TAG+DIST.HASH
> 
> TAG is the last tag of the git branch, usually something like
> MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, DIST is the number of commits since the last release and
> HASH is the first seven letters of the git hash for the commit. E.g.
> 
> 0.7.0-pre+518.badcafe
> 
> Right now instead of this I am forced to use something like
> 
> 0.6.999.518
> 
> which is a lot less expressive and there is no (easy) way to include the
> branch information.
> 
> Thanks, Best Regards,
> Gabor
> 
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> 
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