Use of %dist tag

[Hans de Goede]

Hi all,

I was wondering about the %dist tag. Afaik the whole idea behind this 
tag is to make sure that upgrades from one FC core + extras to the next 
goes smooth even if the SPEC hasn't changed, so the new extras package 
is just a rebuild of the old. Right?

And also to keep things sane when making changes to extras packages for 
different release. Say we have FC3 and FC4.

Now xxx has to be newer in the FC4 repo then in FC3, so we have:
FC3 xxx-1.0-2
FC4 xxx-1.0-3

Now we need to fix a bug for both FC versions so what do we get now? 
something like:
FC3 xxx-1.0-2.1
FC4 xxx-1.0-4

Because we can't make FC3-3 since that could cause problems for people 
installing extras from CD's or the like right?

With dist tags we would get:
FC3 xxx-1.0-2.fc3
FC4 xxx-1.0-2.fc4

Now we need to fix a bug for both FC versions so now we get:
FC3 xxx-1.0-3.fc3
FC4 xxx-1.0-3.fc4

So to me using dist tags seems much cleaner. Now what I've read using 
dist tags is not mandatory, but what is wise?

Regards,

Hans