Re: OS_VERSION on Linux

[Michael Forney <mforney%mforney.org@localhost>]

On 2020-10-09, Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost> wrote:
> * On 2020-10-09 at 20:02 BST, nia wrote:
>
>> I have Opinions about this check in pkg_add.
>>
>> It's often wrong even on NetBSD (e.g. it will warn you about
>> installing 9.0 packakges on 9.1, even though that's currently
>> the recommended procedure)...
>>
>> AFAIK, joyent has it locally patched out?
>
> Yeh, I remove it for our macOS package sets.  I'd recommend doing the
> same for anyone who is distributing packages for OS which do not break
> ABI compatibility.
>
> It definitely doesn't make any sense on Linux.

Agreed. So maybe what is needed is just smarter platform-specific
tests in add/perform.c:compatible_platform(). For Linux, it could just
always return 1, and for other platforms, it could check whatever is
appropriate for that platform.

Currently, the versions are considered compatible if the package
version is a substring of the host version, and on NetBSD, trailing
suffixes _ALPHA, _BETA, _RC, _STABLE, and _PATCH are ignored. It
sounds to me like NetBSD might need some extra logic to allow
increasing minor versions (or perhaps to only compare the major
version).