On Tue, Sep 07 2021, Xinglu Chen wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 06 2021, Sarah Morgensen wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Xinglu Chen <public@yoctocell.xyz> writes:
>>
>>> Any trick you used to find all of there weird version numbers?  :-)
>>
>> This monstrosity:
>>
>>   rg -U -B4 --pcre2 '(?!\(let.*(\n.*){0,1})\(version "([^\n"]*[^0-9\.][^"\n]*)".*(\n.*){0,10}commit.*version' gnu/packages
>>
>> and to show just the versions:
>>
>>   rg -Uor '$2' --pcre2 --no-filename --no-line-number 
>
> Wow!  I will try that and see for myself!  :-)
>
>>>> IMO, just get rid of the delimiter.  If we wanted to be *that* flexible,
>>>> we could make it so they provide a tag->version proc instead of (prefix,
>>>> suffix, delimiter).
>>>
>>> a ‘tag->version’ procedure would probably make things a bit too
>>> complicated for the people writing package definitions.  For example,
>>> having a delimiter would make it easy to match a tag like
>>> “2021-01-01-release”
>>>
>>> Delimiter is “.” (sorry if this hurts your eyes ;-))
>>>
>>> scheme@(guile-user)> (match:substring (string-match "^[^0-9]*([^\\.[:punct:]]+(\\.[^\\.[:punct:]]+)*).*$" "2021-01-01-release") 1)
>>> $28 = "2021"
>>>
>>> Delimiter is “-”
>>>
>>> scheme@(guile-user)> (match:substring (string-match "^[^0-9]*([^-[:punct:]]+(-[^-[:punct:]]+)*).*$" "2021-01-01-release") 1)
>>> $29 = "2021-01-01-release"
>>>
>>> And then, setting the suffix to “-release” would match just the version
>>> part.
>>
>> Right.  I missed that.
>>
>> In that vein, should we keep the dashes in "2021-01-01" or convert them
>> to periods?
>
> Having periods would be more consistent, then could have a
> ‘date->version’ procedure that replaces the hyphens with dots and have
>
>   (git-reference
>     (url "https://git.example.org")
>     (commit (date->version version)))
>
>> What about when a tag has underscores?
>
> Hmm, not sure about that, below is a list of packages I could find which had
> underscores as delimiters
>
> gnu/packages/graphics.scm
> 239:          (commit "DIRECTFB_1_7_7")))
> gnu/packages/gstreamer.scm
> 326:          (commit "ESOUND_0_2_41")))
> gnu/packages/java.scm
> 13925:                      (commit "jboss-transaction-api_1.2_spec-1.1.1.Final")))
>
> They all seem to use periods in the ‘version’ field, though, so I would
> say that the underscroes, should also be converted to periods.
>
>> What if a repo has tags in both formats?  Then "3.0.1" would be
>> considered older than "2011-01-01".
>
> That’s tricky, there isn’t really a way to know how old “3.0.1” is,
> without looking at the metadata of the tag.  Maybe this is one of those
> corner cases which can’t really automatically determine the latest
> release.  Should we have a ‘no-refresh?’ property to tell the refresh to
> not try to update the package?
>
>> Maybe we should just add an extra bit to detect a date format and only
>> consider it when there's no "proper versions"?
>
> That could be a good idea!
>
>> Aaaand I fell down a rabbit hole after that :) I've attached a patch
>> with what I've done.  It still has lots of issues--it requires the tag
>> to contain at least one version delimiter, it requires the first
>> character of the version to be a number... it might not even be better
>> than before I touched it, and even so the added complexity might not be
>> worth it.  But if you'd like to take it for a spin, I've attached it (it
>> applies straight on master).
>
> Great! I will try it out and see how it compares to my current WIP
> version.
>
> Not having characters in the first version number probably isn’t such a
> big deal, most version that contain characters end with a character.
> E.g., “1.2.3a” is not to uncommon, but “a1.2.3” is rarely seen.

I made some changes, to the patch and ran ‘guix refresh -t generic-git |
grep "^gnu/packages.*no valid’; I also modified the ‘github’ updater so
that it wouldn’t be used.
  
  (define %github-updater
    (upstream-updater
     (name 'github)
     (description "Updater for GitHub packages")
     (pred (const #f)) ;this right here
     (latest latest-release)))

Attached is a file with all the packages that didn’t have any valid
tags, and with a short description of perharps why no valid tags were
found.

Something I noticed was the a lot of Julia package use a version scheme
like this:

  (version "1.2.3+0")

The "+0" is included in the version field and acts like a “revision”; I
am not familiar with the Julia ecosystem, and I am not sure how we
should handle this situation.

The updated patch is also attached.