Improve the way rpm decides what is newer

[Adam Williamson]

On Sat, 2009-11-21 at 09:43 -0600, Mike McGrath wrote:

> > > We should just use release epochs, people might hate them for whatever
> > > reasons, but they would easily prevent such issues from happing.
> > >
> >
> > Which sounds great until 3.0.1 goes out on f11 while 2.5 is out on f12. Really
> > don't want to see that "upgrade" happen.
> >
> 
> Epochs are nasty.  Can anyone think of any other mechanism they could use
> with rpm?  I'm not talking about what rpm can do today, but any other
> mechanism we could make rpm do tomorrow that could replace epoch?

I was going to suggest what seems an obvious alternative way to do what
Christian wants, without changing anything in rpm. Instead of:

foobar-1.0-1.fc12.x86-64

have:

foobar-fc12-1.0-1.x86-64

it has the problem that we'd have to do something horrible one time to
switch to that system, of course, but that seems the 'cleanest' way to
do it. I'm still not sure it's necessary. I think as Jesse does - any
time this is broken indicates maintainer error, our work should focus on
helping maintainers not make errors.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
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