[* Let's please continue this on tech-pkg, now that we have it! *]


On 23 Jun 1998, Marc Horowitz wrote:
> >> But this assumption can be wrong. A newer package can come with new major
> >> version of a shared library.
> This is what major and minor package version numbers are for.  Of
> course, it's unlikely that X will ever ship with a new major version
> number, but that's besides the point.

No, that's exactly the point here: if you make a minor tweak to a pkg -
say to make it run on yet another platform or fix a bug, as for X or even
the OS itself - there's currently no way to distinguish between two binary
pkgs and see which one is the one you want. 

Some overkill solutions like "/bin/cat all pkg source files and run it 
through md5(1)" will produce some results, even for pkgsrc as well as the 
system (ewww, 200MB md5 checksum X-/), but...

For pkgsrc, we could (probably...!) implement some "version counter" in 
the Makefile or so that could be incremented on every chance (maybe even 
automatically via some smart cvs script on the server?), but for the OS 
sets this gets a bit more difficult... 

But if someone comes up with a good solution, we're open for inputs. :)


 - Hubert

--
Hubert Feyrer <hubert.feyrer@rz.uni-regensburg.de>