fedora-legacy agrees to enforce rpm upgrades? (was: Warren's Package Naming Proposal - Revision 1)

[Carlos Villegas]

On Fri, Nov 07, 2003 at 05:47:17PM +0100, Axel Thimm wrote:
> When was this agreed upon?
> 
> While I personally support this scheme, I was under the impression
> that there were more people against enforcing rpm upgrades for
> minimally changes (e.g. fedora-legacy should only provide security
> related errata). Especially because RH itself did not issue errata for
> rpm despite the known problems.
> 
> In fact, Warren, I believe we were the only two supporting rpm
> upgrades, so unless we are the only left subscribers of fedora-legacy,
> it is not yet an agreement of the whole list. ;)

I have no strong opinion on this. I am ignorant of the exact details 
of the rpm format differences that have to do with these versions. 

However I'm not sure if there are people interested in supporting versions
which they don't actually use, if that's the case the "format
incompatibilities" among different versions become mute, since the
rpms would be built using the native rpm for each version by the 
parties interested in supporting those versions. I don't really see
a need for changing rpm, and I agree that it would be "nice" to do
it, but I'm not sure if it is worth it/needed.

So I ask (mostly out of interest in gaining more understanding of this):
What are those differences, and why would we prefer a newer version?

Carlos