Improve the way rpm decides what is newer

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2009-11-21 at 00:58 +0100, Christian Iseli wrote:
> Hi folks,
> 
> I also got bitten by the "FC11 packages 'newer' than FC12" hickup, and
> while going through the yum remove/add maneuver I pondered:
> - is there ever a time when, while upgrading from Fedora n to Fedora
>   n+1 I would expect a package .fcn to be kept instead of getting
>   the .fcn+1 instance ?
> My answer was: no
> 
> So I wondered if there would be a simple way to make this happen
> regardless of whether a maintainer blunders and gets things slightly
> out of sync between the 2 or 3 current Fedora releases.

To me, this is the wrong fix. The problem here isn't RPM's version
comparison logic, which is perfectly sound. Instead of nerfing up RPM
comparisons, which are already full of enough hidden mines, we should
just improve Fedora's package versioning conventions so this doesn't
happen, or at least happens less often.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net