svn or arch

[Colin Walters]

On Sat, 2004-12-18 at 02:14 +0100, Enrico Scholz wrote:
> walters at redhat.com (Colin Walters) writes:
> 
> >> > Yes; but you still have the rpm revision number.  I am arguing for its
> >> > removal entirely.
> >> 
> >> How will you workaround non-numeric versions which would break rpmvercmp()
> >> without manual revisions?
> >
> > Perhaps the spec file could provide a little python function to fix
> > upstream versions.
> 
> How do you fix '2.6.9-rc1'?

However the kernel packagers fix it now.  I don't know how they do it,
but it could include:

1) Don't package -rc, backport changesets instead
2) Convert it to e.g. 2.6.8.999rc1
3) Fix RPM to have an prerelease character which sorts
   lower than even nothing; Debian uses '~' for this purpose, so you
   could use 2.6.9~rc1 which is earlier than 2.6.9

> > Or you have an override file.
> 
> What is that?

An explicit mapping from upstream versions to RPM versions, like:

2.6.9-rc1 2.6.8.99rc1

Or maybe it could use regular expressions.

> > Or (preferably) you get upstream to name their versions sanely.
> 
> Hahaha... that's a good one... I will ask Linus to use sane version
> numbers. ;)

Why don't you?  He seems to choose versions rather randomly; IIRC there
were a number of people upset when he suddenly decided to release a
version with 4 components.  I don't think it's unrealistic at all to ask
him to use version numbers which are compatible with RPM and dpkg.