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

[Jussi Lehtola]

On Sun, 2009-06-21 at 18:22 +0530, Prasad H. L. wrote:
> I second this.
> 
> Can't we have only one stable repository which is for "Fedora",
> instead of one each FC10, FC11, ...?
> 
> "development", "testing" and "stable" three repositories for "Fedora"
> as a whole and snapshots of stable as releases?
> 
> That would make definitely user's life simple and I believe would make
> so even for the developers.

But that's the way it is now. Rawhide (development) is the bleeding-edge
distribution, which is frozen every six months for a stable release.

There is a sound need for these releases: you have to stabilize the
package set so that you don't have to use a broken system. If you want
to try what happens when any system components can change whenever they
want, breaking dependencies on other packages, use rawhide.

The versioning of packages with %{?dist} (.fc10, .fc11 and so on) also
has a purpose. Different versions of Fedora use different compiler
versions and optimization flags that are not present in older versions.
That's why it's important that when you update to a newer distribution
all of your packages are updated as well to versions compiled with the
new compiler and optimization flags.
-- 
Jussi Lehtola
Fedora Project Contributor
jussilehtola at fedoraproject.org