Re: Versioned package name change?

["Hauke Fath (SPG)" <hf%spg.tu-darmstadt.de@localhost>]

On 1/19/24 00:50, Greg Troxel wrote:
> Despite SUPERCEDES working for pkgin, it doesn't work for the people
> that use make replace.    So I would lean to
>
>    Don't rename it, because the name being off is not terrible.  It's
>    especially not terrible for an old version that probably people should
>    be trying to transition away from.  (But the DESCR are bad; that is
>    not manifest.)

A bit of background: Netatalk 3 discontinued ddp protocol support, 
cutting off file and print services for most of the pre-Darwin 
Macintoshes. That is why there are two Netatalk packages.

A few years ago, I pushed upstream those of the netatalk-22 patches 
accumulated that were of general interest, and got them accepted, 
resulting in a minor update on the supposedly-dead Netatalk 2 branch.

Eventually, a growing Apple II and Mac retro community set their eyes on 
file server support. There were forks of Netatalk 2, attempting to fix 
issues and support more (older) protocol versions. At some point, Daniel 
stepped up, worked with Netatalk upstream to integrate those fixes into 
both branches, and became a developer.

Since Netatalk 3 too has become legacy with Apple's decision to phase 
out AppleShare in favour of SMB3, there is the idea of merging ddp 
support back into the mainline. But that is some way off; the cleanup 
and deprecation of old platform support in 2.3 may be part of 
re-aligning the branches.

>    Take this as a lesson that when naming a package for a version, to
>    think about the likely trajectory of versions and what does and does
>    not need to be versioned.

At the time, my crystal ball was away for re-polishing, and there was 
virtually no perspective for another Netatalk 2 release.  ;)

"netatalk-ddp" might have been a better package name, yes.

>    The real bug is that upstreams should be good
>    enough about compatibility that there is essentially no desire to have
>    multiple versions of a pacakge in the first place.

Upstream "moving forward" deprecated a feature that enough people found 
they still wanted. In hindsight, that was premature, yes.

Bottom line: As a regular user of pkg_rolling-replace, I'll just stick 
with "netatalk22".

Cheerio,
Hauke

--
     The ASCII Ribbon Campaign                    Hauke Fath
()     No HTML/RTF in email	        Institut für Nachrichtentechnik
/\     No Word docs in email                     TU Darmstadt
     Respect for open standards              Ruf +49-6151-16-21344