Deciding between very old stable or old unstable source

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1

Hello,

I am the package maintainer for python3Packages.pydes, a library needed by another Python program I am packaging for NixOS. When I first packaged PyDes, I chose to fetch the source from GitHub (which didn’t have releases) and mark the version with unstable-<date of last commit>.

I recently noticed that repology has marked the NixOS Package specifically as “ignored” due to it using a date and not the last version (2.0.1, which was released in 2016) like other distributions. I have already experimented with fetching the older source directly from PyPi, this however has the drawback of not including tests (which the latest GitHub commits have).

Is it nevertheless advisable to “downgrade” to a released version, skipping non-existent tests, and keeping in line with other distributions, or continuing to use the last commits from GitHub?

Both versions work fine with minimal differences except the ones stated above.

2

Maybe this should be a question against the repology upstream instead? Surely all other distros using an arguably outdated package - and the tooling mis-judging the situation - is the problem here.

3

I looked at the upstream of pydes, and I think the best course of action would be to ask the pydes maintainer which version of the package they think should be packaged; it’s likely the one currently on pypi, as that’s the package they published.

The versions are indeed mostly equivalent, it’s probably just a case of a more recent bout of motivation from the dev, that didn’t quite result in a new release - just how FOSS often works.

There’s a chance help with releasing a new version would be appreciated, too, so I went ahead and wrote an issue on their github repository :slight_smile:

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