Mandrake rpms and sorting order

[Vladimir Vukicevic <vladimir ximian com>]

Does anyone on this list have any insight into how Mandrake sorts their
rpm version numbers?  The behaviour I'm seeing right now is the
following... with two packages, say,

ghostscript-5.50-35mdk.i586.rpm
ghostscript-5.50-35.1mdk.i586.rpm

Doing a vercmp() straight from librpm on those two versions gives:

vladimir@rain[1012]% zz 'ghostscript-53.5-10.1mdk'
'ghostscript-53.5-10mdk'
result: -1

... which would indicate that the 10.1mdk package is less than the 10mdk
package, which is not the order that Mandrake sorts these in.  When I
attempted to install the 10.1mdk package over the 10mdk package using
--justdb --nodeps to see if rpm 3.0.5 stock would give an error message,
rpm 3.0.5 was killed by the kernel due to an out of memory condition.
An strace showed an infinite loop of lseek(fd, #, SEEK_SET) read()
brk(), with the # being the same each time. Note that if I try to just
install the 10.1mdk package by itself, it goes in fine (so there is no
package corruption going on). Of course, on a Mandrake system, this
works fine.

Examining the Mandrake-patched rpm 3.0.5 didn't reveal any patches to
rpmvercmp() nor any overriding of the oldpackage problem filter...

Any thoughts greatly appreciated. :-)

Thanks,

    - Vladimir