Excerpts from daniel.buenzli's message of Tue Jan 29 18:56:37 +0100 2008:
> 
> Le 29 janv. 08 à 11:56, Berke Durak a écrit :
> 
> > We thus need versions, and lots of them!  We need to base our
> > developer packages on a version control system, in the style of BSD
> > ports.  BSD ports are usually based on CVS, sometimes on Subversion.
> 
> My experience with bsd-like port systems (at least darwinports) is  
> that _port description files_ are versioned. But the bits they compile  
> are tarball releases, they do not pull directly out of the projects'  
> vcs to install your local copy.

I  think  this  was  what  Berke  has in mind to. However the repository still
becomes very large even if there only a few files by package.

[...]

> For me this is too fine grained -- and this is also the reason why you  
> want to integrate a vcs to your system. I would like to be able to  
> specify a version that the developer of the package deemed stable  
> enough to distribute, not a random revision. I strongly think that  
> tarball releases are enough, if there are simple and efficient tools  
> to produce them. Going down to the revision is overkill.

Perhaps  not so overkill for developers, if you've just patched a project, you
need   to  update  the  package  quickly  and  perhaps  not  want  to  have  a
release/tarball  for  each  of  them.  I think that the upstream source can be
either  a tarball URL or a VCS URL. For upstream sources one can supports some
VCSs (CVS, SVN, darcs, git, hg) since one only need to checkout.

> >   I know there is Omake,
> 
> Having used ocamlbuild for caml projects, for me it is out of question  
> to return to something make-like.

Of course, I agree also on this :)

-- 
Nicolas Pouillard aka Ertai