My thoughts on repotag

[Dag Wieers]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Michael Schwendt wrote:

> On Mon, 19 Mar 2007 12:27:48 +0000 (GMT), Lance Davis wrote:
> 
> > On Mon, 19 Mar 2007, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > 
> > > It still fails for branch-specific (i.e. dist-specific) fixes, where the
> > > least-significant portion of the full %release value is increased for
> > > rebuilds or minor fixes:
> > >
> > > 	foo-1.0.0-2.el5.fdr.1 < foo-1.0.0-2.el5.rf
> > 
> > but foo-1.0.0-2.el5.fdr < foo-1.0.0-2.el5.rf so it wouldnt be installed in 
> > the first place if you had those repos configured ...
> 
> And that is flawed.
> 
> The package release string gets longer without telling anything about
> which of the packages is newer. Anyone still want to claim that these tags
> don't influence RPM version comparison? ;) Packagers would be forced to
> increment the most-significant part of %release, breaking the dist-upgrade
> path,
> 
>     foo-1.0.0-3.el4.fdr > foo-1.0.0-2.el5.fdr
> 
> unless superfluous mass-updates and mass-rebuilds are used.

Once again a self-serving example, it has nothing to do with repotags.

	foo-1.0.0-3.el4 > foo-1.0.0-2.el5

I'm sure you could have come up with this:

	foo-1.0.0-2.el4.1.fdr < foo-1.0.0-2.el5.0.fdr

Which is exactly how it used to be without the repotag. I can only see bad 
intent in the form of your examples.

 
> > It could be mandated that repotag always comes last and is preceeded by a 
> > (default 0) build id
> > 
> > eg foo-1.0.0-2.el5.1.fdr > foo-1.0.0-2.el5.0.fdr
> 
> Looks like EL5.1 and EL5.0 to me and is something like:
> 
>   Release: 2%{?dist}.0%{?repo}
> 
> ?? And then you want packagers to bump release in that macro-madness?
> 
> %dist and %repo -- and %fedora and %rhel -- are undefined by default.
> Rebuild such src.rpms results in completely incompatible packages.
> 
>   foo-1.0.0-2.1 > foo-1.0.0-2.0 > foo-1.0.0-2.el5.1.fdr > ...

You are bringing up some good points that do not concern repotags at all. 
And which RPMforge does have a policy for.

But it does not influence the decision on repotags.

Kind regards,
--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]