In the package guidelines, PKG_VERSION is supposed to be used as
"The upstream version number that we're downloading", while
PKG_RELEASE is referred to as "The version of this package Makefile".
Thus, the variables in a strict interpretation provide a clear
distinction between "their" (upstream) version in PKG_VERSION and
"our" (local OpenWrt trunk) version in PKG_RELEASE.
For local (OpenWrt-only) packages, this implies that those will only
need PKG_RELEASE defined, while PKG_VERSION does not apply following
a strict interpretation. While the majority of "our" packages actually
follow that scheme, there are also some that mix both variables or
have one of them defined but keep them at "1".
This is misleading and confusing, which can be observed by the fact
that there typically either one of the variables is never bumped or
the choice of the variable to increase depends on the person doing the
change.
Consequently, this patch aims at clarifying the situation by
consistently using only PKG_RELEASE for "our" packages. To achieve
that, PKG_VERSION is removed there, bumping PKG_RELEASE where
necessary to ensure the resulting package version string is bigger
than before.
During adjustment, one has to make sure that the new resulting composite
package version will not be considered "older" than the previous one.
A useful tool for evaluating that is 'opkg compare-versions'. In
principle, there are the following cases:
1. Sole PKG_VERSION replaced by sole PKG_RELEASE:
In this case, the resulting version string does not change, it's
just the value of the variable put in the file. Consequently, we
do not bump the number in these cases so nobody is tempted to
install the same package again.
2. PKG_VERSION and PKG_RELEASE replaced by sole PKG_RELEASE:
In this case, the resulting version string has been "version-release",
e.g. 1-3 or 1.0-3. For this case, the new PKG_RELEASE will just
need to be higher than the previous PKG_VERSION.
For the cases where PKG_VERSION has always sticked to "1", and
PKG_RELEASE has been incremented, we take the most recent value of
PKG_RELEASE.
Apart from that, a few packages appear to have developed their own
complex versioning scheme, e.g. using x.y.z number for PKG_VERSION
_and_ a PKG_RELEASE (qos-scripts) or using dates for PKG_VERSION
(adb-enablemodem, wwan). I didn't touch these few in this patch.
Cc: Hans Dedecker <dedeckeh@gmail.com>
Cc: Felix Fietkau <nbd@nbd.name>
Cc: Andre Valentin <avalentin@marcant.net>
Cc: Matthias Schiffer <mschiffer@universe-factory.net>
Cc: Jo-Philipp Wich <jo@mein.io>
Cc: Steven Barth <steven@midlink.org>
Cc: Daniel Golle <dgolle@allnet.de>
Cc: John Crispin <john@phrozen.org>
Signed-off-by: Adrian Schmutzler <freifunk@adrianschmutzler.de>
9c170cb92f