On disttags (was: Choosing rpm-release for fc1 and fdr add-on rpms)

Axel Thimm Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
Sat May 15 07:29:07 UTC 2004


On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 06:47:13PM +0200, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 14:19, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 01:37:45PM +0200, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> > > > Projects very near to Fedora Core (not "3rd party") like Fedora
> > > > Extras predecessor fedora.us, and fedoralegacy.org do require more
> > > > often to have common builds differentiating in the release built
> > > > against. So disttags are required.
> > > 
> > > Not necessarily. When discussing build systems, more than once the idea
> > > popped up that the maintainer shouldn't care about the release and that
> > > it would be autogenerated. These kind of build systems would be fed from
> > > a revision control system where you would put different distro-versions
> > > into different branches. How the build system generates release tags
> > > from that is a matter of discussion, but nothing the package maintainer
> > > should have to care for then.
> > 
> > Hm, I'd argue that the release tag is often quite important (the
> > buildid before the disttag), because it can be referred to from other
> > package in dependencies. E.g. when you move a file from one package to
> > another or have any special new releationship between packages than
> > need to Conflict/Require something based on the release tag.
> 
> You can always use the releasetag generated by the build system for
> this.

If it is coming from an SCM and is immediatly retrievable, it's OK. If
you had to wait for a rawhide build to see your release tag to use in
further dependencies that would be less useful.

> > That's another point where disttags are useful. If you fix your
> > package foo to foo-1.2.3-5.fc1 and foo-1.2.3-5.fc2, you can safely use
> > only
> > 
> > # foo up to 1.2.3-4 was buggy
> > Requires: foo >= 1.2.3-5
> > 
> > without mentining any disttags in the packages bar-6.7.8-9.fc1 and
> > bar-6.7.8-9.fc2, e.g. the disttag does not have to be mentioned in
> > dependencies. A scheme with manual coding of upgrade paths would
> > require different specfiles for bar-6.7.8-9.fc1 and bar-6.7.8-9.fc2 as
> > the dependencies would have to written differently.
> 
> Agreed, but this is only true in the special case where you use the same
> version/release across all dists.

That's exactly what disttags are good for. And it is not a too special
case outside of Red Hat. Almost all 3rd party repos support more than
one release and package the same upstream version/same patches
multiple times. The closest examples are fedora.us and
fedoralegacy. Both these projects and the rest of the repos would
benefit greatly from a canonical introduction of disttags.

And there is no drawback (aesthetics put aside, but we have already
lost the beauty price, so let's try for the technology award ;).
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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