[opentheory-users] package versions

[Ramana Kumar]

In what sense are packages with the same name and different versions
supposed to be similar?

I would think that they are supposed to be accomplishing the same goal
and later versions are just improvements.
The opentheory tool currently seems to encourage treating them as
unrelated packages.

Specifically, I have a couple of suggestions about leaving version numbers off:
For the opentheory install command, leaving the version number off a
package name should just install the latest version of a package with
that name.
Similarly, within a package block in a theory file, a bare name should
refer to the latest version.

This would mean that a package's meaning would change over time even
if the package stays the same, which might not be desirable.
But it means a package depending on base wouldn't need to itself get a
new version (with someone manually updating the theory file) every
time base gets a new version.
Other package management systems (e.g. for software) seem to work like
this, although they sometimes allow a range of versions to be
specified, e.g. package: base>=1.2 would mean anything after base-1.2
should do.