[Seaside-dev] beta?

[Julian Fitzell]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:11 PM, Dale Henrichs
<dale.henrichs at gemstone.com> wrote:
> Metacello has first-class versions as well, but parsing strings is part of the game. Humans will be writing and reading the strings:
>
>  Loader load: 'ConfigurationOfSeaside' version: '2.8.4'
>
> So Metacello has parsing rules for versions to convert back and forth between versions and strings.

Seems like that's always going to depend on people following a
particular convention. So either you force everyone to use the same
convention for their projects (not likely) or accept that the
Metacello version number may not match the project's own numbering
character-by-character... no?

I suppose the alternative is to track ancestry of versions somehow,
but that's a whole other story.

> I know that with Monticello, there never was a concrete (read enforced) definition for the file name. Gofer has imposed a parsing scheme on Monticello file names that works pretty well for calculating the latest file, but falls down when the creators of a Monticello filename use a convention that is at odds with Gofer's scheme ...
>
> I want to avoid that problem with Metacello, so this early in the game I'm willing to change my parsing scheme.

Sure, but is that really going to solve the problem universally (i.e.
for projects other than Seaside)?

> GRVersion can certainly be converted to MetacelloVersionNumber, but I am worried about the print string format (call me anal).
>
> If you are going to write a message that says load 1.0a6 of Grease, then I would hope that Metacello would load '1.0a6' of Grease and that the sort order of versions will work (there is a load latest option in Metacello)....Since I've already gone and created a version called 1.0alpha51 I can't imagine a parser/sorter that would sort 1.0a6 later than 1.0alpha5.1. If you can think of one I am interested.

Well, I can't personally imagine ever writing alpha6 in an email
unless I was really forcing myself to. I can imagine being told to
load a6, asking for a list of versions, and realizing that alpha6 is
the same thing, though...

As for parsing/sorting, Mozilla's scheme sounds like it might allow
what you want (
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Toolkit_version_format ) but it may
be a bit overkill.

> I'm already pretty well convinced that I was overly optimistic that something like 1.0-a6 would fly as a version naming scheme. But I am willing to change and from what I can tell, you'd like to use the name 1.0a6 instead of 1.0alpha6, so I think I will be changing the ConfigurationOfGrease configs ... better now, than later.

Well, I note that GRVersion's #greaseString is currently outputting
'alpha6' :) but that's just because I was using symbols for the
#alpha, #beta, and it was easier to just output the whole thing. I
dunno - mostly I'd just rather there was a way we didn't have to be so
sticky about strings. :)

Julian