On Wed, June 20, 2007 11:18 pm, djh wrote:
Since 5.9.5 is basically a beta 5.10.0, I would actually make it
a test version of a new perl5.10 package (so perl5.10-5.9.5-1).
Since 5.9.5 is 5.9.5, you should leave it as it is and not
give it some whimsical name. Such is that which causes confusion. It is
better to keep standards and names, rather than invent them.
When 5.10.0 is released, the package would be updated to
perl5.10-5.10.0-1 and move to current.
When 5.10.0 is released then we have 5.10.0.
I believe that keeping to the real names and not inventing others, which
would simply serve to confuse people.
This has been done before, with other packages and does beget confusion.
Respect for a packages, name and version number, should be considered
important. Or is there some fundamental reason why, one needs to use a
different name other than the original.
1) perl 5.8.x and the impending 5.10.x (currently under development
as 5.9.x, a series of version numbers reserved for development, aka
experimental, use) are binary incompatible with each other.
Any user who installs extra modules will be able to use those
modules only for the version used to build them. So,
2) the perl package can only be used for one of the two. It's
reasonable to provide another package with a different name for
one of the two, and since the existing perl package is perl 5.8.x,
5.9.x/5.10.x needs a different package name. But,
3) there is no compelling reason I can thing of for introducing
separate perl5.9.5 and perl5.10 packages, since the former will
be obsolete with the release of 5.10.0, in 2 or at most 3 months.
So it makes sense to me to release the test package for development
version leading up to 5.10.0 as the perl5.10 package. If it
were to be a non-test release, or a release that would endure
after the advent of 5.10.0, I might agree with you.