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

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva redhat com>]

On May 17, 2004, Axel Thimm <Axel Thimm ATrpms net> wrote:

> Or you pick the same release tag (for example "3") and add a different
> suffix that will always be rpm-less for FC1 than for FC2 like "fc1"
> and "fc2". The packages are now called foo-1.2-3.fc1 and foo-1.2-3.fc2
> and you know that the true buildid is the "3" which can be used in
> ranged dependencies (Requires: foo >= 1.2-3).

Oh, that's what you want disttags for?  Sorry, but it isn't going to
work.

Consider that FC3 shipped with say foo-1.2-7.fc3.  FC4 will probably
undergo a few mass rebuilds, which will make foo-1.2-9.fc4 the package
in FC4.  While FC5 is under development, a security problem is found
in foo, and the patch is back-ported into FC3 and FC4.

I suppose this is going to result in foo-1.2-7.fc3.1, foo-1.2-9.fc4.1
and foo-1.2-10.fc5 (rawhide), all of them containing the fix.  You
can't just use the version tag to identify packages containing the
fix.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva {redhat com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva {lsd ic unicamp br, gnu.org}