Re: Question about changing versioning for TeX Live packages

[Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi Nicolas,

Sorry if this had been answered elsewhere, I have missed it.

On Sat, 15 Jun 2024 at 19:07, Nicolas Goaziou via "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." <guix-devel@gnu.org> wrote:

> I'd like to change versioning for TeX Live packages. Currently, it
> refers to a revision number in the upstream SVN repository, such as
> 70951.
>
> I'd rather use tags from TeX Live releases, e.g., "2023.0", for at least
> two reasons:
>
> 1. We don't need a granularity to the revision level for TeX Live
>    packages;
> 2. Revision numbers are not very user-friendly, while tags are.
>
> In a nutshell, my plan is to change version for all packages from
> (revision) 66594 to the equivalent tag "2023.0". Unfortunately, as
> mathematics go, 2023 is lesser than 66594. As a consequence, this may
> introduce trouble when upgrading those packages. Therefore, my question
> is the following: how could I proceed to make this version change as
> smooth as possible for end-users?

Well, if I read correctly, there is:

  guix/build-system/texlive.scm:

        (define %texlive-tag "texlive-2023.0")
        (define %texlive-revision 66594)

  gnu/packages/texlive.scm:

        (define %texlive-date "20230313")
        (define %texlive-year (string-take %texlive-date 4))


And the issue seems:

        (define-public texlive
           (package
            (name "texlive")
            (version %texlive-date)

and

        (define-public texlive-scripts
          (package
            (name "texlive-scripts")
            (version (number->string %texlive-revision))


Therefore, indeed it will be complicated to replace the ’version’ of
’texlive-scripts’ by something as ’2023’.

But why not a ’version’ as something as ’texlive’?  Or just 2023XY?
Where XY is something to determine as the month or something else.

Are we speaking a change only for the package field ’version’?  Or is
the discussion also about replacing the way to fetch from upstream?

Cheers,
simon