Why do we need FC version attached to the package name?

[Jerry James]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 1:31 AM, Jesse Keating<jkeating at j2solutions.net> wrote:
> If you have any ideas I'd like to hear them. A super epoch has already been
> suggested but that just masks the problem and may cause unwanted downgrades.
> Any solution either involves severly limiting what kind of updates can be
> done or requiring network access during upgrades.

There is a solution, although it also suffers from the "unwanted
downgrades" problem, and requires such fundamental infrastructure
changes that it is probably impractical.  Change the way RPM compares
versions:

1. The dist tag is most significant.  An fc11 tag always beats an fc10
tag, regardless of version number.
2. The release tag is the least significant.  This is essentially a
counter, saying how many times a given package has been released for a
given distribution.

The upstream version number is purely informational.  This means that
Epoch tags are unnecessary.  If you need to downgrade a package in a
distribution, you bump up the release tag and bump down the version
tag.  On upgrade, the higher dist tag moves you to whatever has been
released in the newer distribution, even if it is a lower upstream
version number.  This fixes the problem of upgrading from F-10 with
updates to F-11 3 months after the release of F-11.

However, there is no reliable way to distinguish wanted downgrades
from unwanted downgrades.  Bummer.
-- 
Jerry James
http://www.jamezone.org/