NVR bugs in rawhide

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 14 Jul 2009 17:54:10 +0200, Ralf wrote:

> Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > On Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:01:50 +0200, Ralf wrote:
> > 
> >>> You don't need to drop %dist for koji build inheritance to work.
> >>>
> >>> It just looks much cleaner to inherit foo-1.0-1.noarch.rpm for all
> >>> newer targets
> >> IFF "current rpm" is sufficiently compatible to the antique version of 
> >> rpm a package has been built on.
> >>
> >> If this doesn't apply you don't get anywhere.
> > 
> > Not _with_ %dist either.
> Of cause it would help. A package's release tag would very verbosely 
> tell you that a package is outdated.

And still it would fail if RPM were changed [the way you describe] while
%dist stayed the same. %dist doesn't reflect at all whether RPM changes
its file format near the beginning of a Fedora devel cycle.

> >> => I agree with Jussi. Allowing people not to use %dist is not helpful. 
> >> It's a booby trap which certainly will hit some day.
> > 
> > %dist is a trap itself - packagers run into it regularly, e.g. when
> > adding Obsoletes and versioned dependencies, when doing trial-and-error
> > fixing of old branches (without paying attention to the recommendations in
> > the guidelines), when committing and tagging after a server-side update of
> > the "branches" file.
> Quite easy to overcome: always use %?dist.

Doesn't help much. Packager still needs to bump all branches [correctly]
to recover.

> It's the cases when people add/remove %?dist, which are problematic.

Going in circles won't be of any use in this thread. Using %dist adds
complications, too. Or else packagers would not run into some of the
pitfalls I've pointed out.