Is it possible for a package to have a wildly different version number than its upstream project?

[mbauman]

I'm looking at what it would take to integrate Julia's packaged JLL ecosystem into repology. A JLL is a Julia package that provides a built library or executable through Julia's package manager, much like apt or homebrew or winrpm. JLLs can and do have wildly different version numbers from their upstream sources. For example, the package NetCDF_jll provides the project netcdf. It's currently at version v401.900.300+0, providing netcdf 4.9.3. There are many reasons we do this; most importantly is that Julia's package versions must be real semantic versions.

Is this possible? How would we report such information up to Repology?

[AMDmi3]

There's no problem here as this package is completely different to netcdf and will never be merged with it.

[mbauman]

Though the name and versions are funny, it is fundamentally exactly the same as all the other packages that package and redistribute the netcdf libraries.

This is just one representative example of the 1500+ projects we bundle and redistribute in this manner. Sometimes the version numbers match in a more typical manner (e.g., OpenSSL_jll v3.5.3+0 provides OpenSSL v3.5.3).

Edit: Note that this is in contrast to the Julia packages that provide more typical programming language "glue" package. For example, there's Cairo_jll, providing the cairo-graphics-library dlls, dylibs and .sos. The higher-level Cairo.jl package is what provides the Julia bindings to those built libraries — and it uses the JLL package as its dependency to ensure it can load and call into the built library. Cairo.jl is a distinct Julia project, whereas Cairo_jll is providing the upstream cairo-graphics-library to the Julia ecosystem.

[AMDmi3]

I think I got the idea - so it still packages C library, but for the use in julia ecosystem? Well no, if it doesn't stick to upstream project name and version, there's no way to support it in Repology.

[mbauman]

Yeah exactly. And shucks, that’s unfortunate.