[Slackbuilds-users] Dosbox philosophical question...

[Arnaud]

Hi everybody!

	well the question is not that philosophical...

Dosbox is a nice project, and works quite well, even since the last version is
as old as may 2010. It looks quite dead but it wouldn't matter much because it
works pretty well as it is.
	But the truth is the developement is still quite active, and there had
been a lot of revisions since 0.74 was out. 0.74 is r3608, and latest is r4055
and is dated from yesterday.

	I'm not sure about the benefices of updating to the latest SVN revision,
but I think there might be some notable improvements, they write about
stability, performance, and better game compatibility.

So as the maintainer of dosbox, I was wondering if it might be a good idea to
change the version for a recent SVN revision.

	There are a few difficulties of doing so :
- 1st. it is hosted on sourceforge, there are no tags, and there is no way of
getting a tarball of a specific revision, so I can't make an easy slackbuild
with a download URL, a md5sum and say "here goes dosbox-0.74-r4055". Except if I
could create such a tarball and host it on slackbuild, which may be a solution.

- 2nd. as those are SVN builds, I can't really know which one to choose, what if
I choose a broken one ? I guess it might be as simple as updating the saved
tarball, and version number, but it doesn't seem to follow the slackware
philosophy of having a solid though up-to-date system. I'd go a bit blind there
hoping for the best. Maybe I should add a dosbox-svn slackbuild specifically for
non-releases versions ?

- 3rd. as it would be by definition of unknown stability, it would be best if it
were easy for builders to try out a different revision, even the latest at any
time, without having to ask me for it, and waiting for a tarball being uploaded,
etc. all that without knowing if it would work better. And it is not really hard
to simply clone the SVN repository, and update to any given revision, then build
a dosbox-0.74.revision package. But is it something we would be doing inside a
slackbuild ? And if the slackbuild doest that (svn checkout && svn update
-r $revision), there wouldn't be any download links inside the dosbox.info file,
how would third party software like sbotools handle that ?

- 4th. sourceforge being as shitty as it is, there also isn't a download link
available for getting the latest revision. Snapshots are only available for the
latest revision, but the revision number is inside the URL, and older snapshots
are removed and inaccessible. I could download some sort of dosbox-latest, and
extract the revision number, and create a latest package with the right version,
which could also mess up with sbotools and the likes (I don't really know).

	As of now, I have a fonctional slackbuild that get a revision number
(4055 by default which is todays latest) that can be overriden by adding
REVISION=... on the command line. Then it does a svn checkout && svn update -r
$REVISION, and creates a package names dosbox-0.74.r$REVISION.
If REVISION=latest is given, it won't update and instead will get the latest
revision number from the SVN repository and creates a well formed package with
the latest revision number in it.
	The download link is still the dosbox-0.74 official release from 2010,
and is not used.
	It compiles fine and works well after a few small tests.


So, what should I do about all that ?


	Yth.