Hi Michael,
On Mon, 12 Jan 2015 18:47:13 -0500, Michael Gilbert <mgilb...@debian.org>
wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 5:03 PM, Stephen Kitt wrote:
> >> Stephen: the last sentence makes it clear that we'll need a sourceful
> >> upload to security-master. Can you arrange for that?
> >
> > Done, I've uploaded binutils-mingw-w64 2+deb7u1 which produces
> > binutils-mingw-w64{,-i686,x86-64} 2.22-8+deb7u2+2+deb7u1 (ugh, that's
> > terrible, sorry...).
>
> Why does the binutils-mingw-w64 source package produce differently
> versioned binary packages? That seems unusual.Unusual but not unheard of! And hopefully justifiable, as I'll try to explain here. The main reason is that the contents of the binary packages depend not only on the contents of the binutils-mingw-w64 source package, but also on those of the binutils-source binary package (which is pretty much the binutils source package). Whenever binutils-mingw-w64 is rebuilt, it picks up whatever the current version of binutils-source is and builds with that; so the version of binutils being used is not predictable at upload time (think NEW queue or simply buildd delays). I wanted the binary version to represent both binutils' version and binutils-mingw-w64's. In this way: * it's obvious for the users what version of binutils is provided by the binary packages; * if binutils changes between the time of upload of binutils-mingw-w64 and the time of build, the resulting version is still correct (there is no divergence currently on the release architectures, but it has happened in the past); * binutils-mingw-w64 can be binNMU'd for newer versions of binutils and still have a meaningful version. In addition to all that it's served as a useful test case for the build tools (debhelper in particular), to ensure they use source and binary versions as appropriate ;-). If I wanted to have a simple version number, that would involve sourceful uploads every time I wanted a build against a new version of binutils, and as explained above the resulting binaries might not be correctly described anyway. (This whole scheme really started with gcc-mingw-w64, where it may be more obviously useful to have the real gcc version in the binary version.) I hope this clarifies things! Regards, Stephen
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