Re: Packages that change without incrementing the version/release

[Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please at cygwin dot com>]

On Fri, Nov 19, 2004 at 12:27:47PM -0000, Max Bowsher wrote:
>In my latest session of setup debugging, I discovered that setup was 
>silently ignoring wrongly sized packages. Once I fixed that, I discovered 
>that I had quite a few packages that failed the check. (Including all the 
>xorg-x11 ones but also:
>
>bzip2/libbz2_0/libbz2_0-1.0.2-1-src.tar.bz2
>fortune/fortune-1.8-2.tar.bz2
>gettext/libintl/libintl-0.10.38-3-src.tar.bz2
>gettext/libintl1/libintl1-0.10.40-1-src.tar.bz2
>irc/irc-20010101-3.tar.bz2
>libpng/libpng2/libpng2-1.0.12-1-src.tar.bz2
>ncurses/libncurses5/libncurses5-5.2-1-src.tar.bz2
>ncurses/libncurses6/libncurses6-5.2-8-src.tar.bz2
>X11/fontconfig/libfontconfig-devel/libfontconfig-devel-2.2.2-1.tar.bz2
>X11/freetype2/libfreetype2-devel/libfreetype2-devel-2.1.5-1.tar.bz2
>X11/gd/libgd-devel/libgd-devel-2.0.28-1.tar.bz2
>X11/libXft/libXft-devel/libXft-devel-2.1.6-1.tar.bz2
>
>).
>
>I presume that at some point all of these have been replaced with slightly 
>tweaked versions without a release increment.
>
>Anyway, this means many users are likely to have old 'invalid' versions of 
>these packages. Which means, that before I can release a new setup, I need 
>to make setup recover gracefully, rather than exiting at the first error as 
>it currently does.

Different sizes should be irrelvant.  The MD5s will not match between the
package disk and the one in setup.ini.  Doesn't that force a re-download?

>Currently I'm thinking along the lines of having setup rename the package 
>files as it finds them, adding a ".BAD" suffix. As far as user feedback 
>goes, I will probably go with a MessageBox summarizing all the problems at 
>the end of the scan, for a short term quick hack to get a new setup out 
>ASAP. Later though it should become a scrollable log textfield.
>
>Comments on the above?

The more feedback we can provide to the user, the better.

cgf