[coherence-dev] Coherence-0.6.6 borked?

[Daniel Robbins]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 6:38 AM, Frank Scholz <fs at beebits.net> wrote:
>
> Any opinions?

In general, a source tarball's contents should not change once it has
been created, because distributions like Gentoo use a md5/sha1 digest
of the source tarball to verify that the download completed
successfully,

When the contents of the tarball change but the name does not, Gentoo
thinks that the download is corrupt and this prevents the package from
installing for users until the Gentoo maintainer of the package is
able to update the md5/sha1 digest in the Portage tree to reflect the
current version of the source tarball.

Because of this, it's best practice to update the name of the source
tarball (with a new version or "-rx" suffix) if you need to make
changes to it, and post an announcement of the new revision on your
site so that people are aware that it is available.

In this specific case, it doesn't matter too much, since Coherence is
not in Gentoo, and I am in the process of trying to add it to Funtoo.
But in the future, the "don't change it unless you rename it" policy
is a good one to follow.

Regards,

Daniel