Re: Package EVR problems in Fedora 2008-06-10

[Kevin Kofler <kevin kofler chello at>]

Richard W.M. Jones <rjones <at> redhat.com> writes:
> Is this wrong?

EVR problems are bad. "Should never happen" type bad. Fedora n+1 updates MUST 
have a higher EVR than Fedora n updates. Rawhide MUST have a higher EVR than 
Fedora n updates for all n except in some rare cases in freeze periods.

> I'm afraid to say that a lot of packages I have do this.  The reason
> is that I develop and build packages on Rawhide, then backport them to
> F-8.  However when backporting to F-8 I have to bump the release
> number up, typically because I have to add an ExcludeArch: ppc64[*]
> for F-8, but may be because of other packing twiddling too.

Then you have to bump the version after the disttag, not in front of it. If you 
do a F8-specific change to a package numbered "2%{?dist}", you have to number 
it as "2%{?dist}.1", not "3%{?dist}".

> I wasn't aware that there had to be a strict increase in package
> numbering between branches.  (In fact, I wasn't aware that Fedora even
> allowed updating between Fedora releases).

Yes, there has to be one and yes, Fedora allows updating from one release to 
the next!

What you have to do now to fix this is to issue "bump version" updates for 
F9 (even if there are no other changes) to fix the EVR ordering.

        Kevin Kofler