On disttags (was: Choosing rpm-release for fc1 and fdr add-on rpms)

[Axel Thimm]

On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 07:16:14AM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 13:37, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> > On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 11:07, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > > And as a community project you cannot keep out of scope "3rd
> > > party" repos. They also support multiple releases of Red Hat and
> > > Fedora and ths need disttags (not repotags!).
> > 
> > Not in my opinion.

> Neither in mine. IMO, what some people on this thread call "disttag"
> actually is the "root distribution's" repotag. What is confusing is
> the fact that RH/FC doesn't use an explicit "RH-repotag/disttag",
> while 3rd party packagers apply different and partially
> contradicting "disttag" conventions.

No, please don't add to this confusion by defining disttags to be
repotags of some kind.

For simplicity's sake forget about repotag, their current
usage/existance etc. The repotag serves no real technical
functionality.

The disttag OTOH is the tools for automatically maintaining upgrade
paths even when building from the same specfile into multiple
different distributions.

E.g. you build foo against FC1's and FC2's glibc and want to build
from FC1 to be rpm-older than the one from FC2.

You achive this by either carefully choosing release tags (say "3" for
FC1, "4" for FC2) which leads to different specfiles/src.rpm etc., and
non-predictable release tags ("which one fixed the xyz issue? Release
3 or 4?").

Or you pick the same release tag (for example "3") and add a different
suffix that will always be rpm-less for FC1 than for FC2 like "fc1"
and "fc2". The packages are now called foo-1.2-3.fc1 and foo-1.2-3.fc2
and you know that the true buildid is the "3" which can be used in
ranged dependencies (Requires: foo >= 1.2-3). And the upgrade paths
are always pertained.

> Having this in mind, I also think, what 3rd party packagers actually
> need is a path into a tree of package sets originating from different
> repositories, e.g.:
> 
> Fedora Core 
> |
> +-> Fedora Extras -> Local FC+FE Add Ons
> +-> ATrpms -> Local FC+ATrpms Add Ons
> +-> ....
> 
> IMO, the actual questions are: Is there a need to encode these paths
> into rpms and if yes how? IMO, yes, there is a need to encode these
> paths.

The above quote is about repotags, don't confuse them with
disttags. And no, repotags are not really needed. Some users think it
is better/easier for identifying package origin, some packagers need
them for their vanity. ;)
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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