Fedora and Fedora Legacy package versioning schemes (was: Retain upgrade paths)

[Axel Thimm]

On Mon, Oct 06, 2003 at 11:39:16AM +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> A proposal on the fedora.us side is to allow rpm to compare "rh9"
> versus "1", which under newer rpms will resolve as older, but which is
> not the case for RH7.x (possibly even stock RH8.0, but I may be
> mistaken).

Small addendum: I just looked it up for another communication on
fedora.us list. This bug was fixed 9 months ago in rpm 4.2-0.55:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=50977#c20

So that means that even RH8.0 is affected. I assume the 4.1.1 backport
available from rpm.org does contain the bug-fix, but I know nothing
about 4.0.5.

> There are updated rpm rpms fixing this issue, but they are neither
> available via RHN, nor can Fedora Legacy assume that those rpms are
> available on the system to be upgraded.
> [...]
> c) Drop upgradability from rpm < 4.1 and use kludgy "rhnumber" <
>    "number" idiom.

This should then probably be "rpm < 4.1.1".

Anyway, the presence of this bug prohibits mixing numerical and
alphabetical segments in rpm comparision for any system running an rpm
from before 2003, unless rpm is upgraded to a version without this bug
before any other upgrading operation.

Therefore IMHO mixing numerical and alphabetical segments in
comparisons should be avoided for legacy considerations.
-- 
Axel.Thimm at physik.fu-berlin.de
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