use disttag ".1" for devel to avoid confusion

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2007-06-05 at 04:32 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-06-04 at 16:56 -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> >> Patrice Dumas wrote:
> >> > On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 04:31:56PM -0400, Christopher Aillon wrote:
> >> >> 
> >> >> My argument is that if packages don't get updated that often, disttag is 
> >> >> rather useless as the chances are low that it will get a fedora udpate 
> >> >> pushed.  And on the off-chance it does, diverging a specfile once is not 
> >> >> a big deal.
> >> >> 
> >> >> I think this is _NOT_ the current state of affairs else we would not 
> >> >> have as many .fc6 packages as we do in F-7.  Those packages should have 
> >> >> the disttag removed IMO.
> >> > 
> >> > Maybe some, but not necessarily all of them. Taking myself as an
> >> > example, I own some python modules that may certainly be better without
> >> > disttag, but I also have C/C++ stuff that, although stable and
> >> > unfrequently updated are certainly better with a disttag.
> >> 
> >> Why is it better with a disttag, out of curiosity?
> > In many cases it's: Though spec files are identical the contents of the
> > binary rpms aren't. directories change (e.g. %_*dir), deps change etc.
> 
> You're missing the point.

I think, I am not ...

>   If a package is only updated e.g. once a 
> year, and that one update is only for e.g. glibc ABI changes -- guess 
> what, ABI in a release (Zod, Moonshine, etc) isn't changing so there's 
> no need to rebuild that.

The %dist tags assure a steady upgrade path on packages' EVRs between
distros. ABI's, API or SONAME changes etc. are not connected to %dist at
all. It's mere maintainer's convenience wrt. EVR consistency, nothing
else.

>   Just bump in rawhide and rebuild there. 
> disttag doesn't gain you anything here in the branches.
Right, but it does when upgrading older distros.

Eg. say, you released package-0.9-1 in FC6 and package-1.0-1 in FC-7.
Applying your rationale, package-1.0 must use package-1.0-2 in rawhide,
otherwise the upgrade path from FC7->FC8 is not assured.

Now, a critical bug has been discovered in package-0.9, and upstream
advises to upgrade to package-1.0.
To be able to do so for FC6, you'll have to use a release number < 1
(otherwise the upgrade path from FC6->FC7 won't work).

Using %dist for FC7 would have allowed to you to simply drop you
package.spec from FC7 into FC6 and rebuild == convenience.

Now, this doesn't make much of a difference when maintaining "a few
packages", but it does when maintaining several dozens.

Also the "update" strategy a maintainer applies makes a difference, e.g.
wrt. perl packages, bug fixes usually are provided by upstream (CPAN).
I.e. the usual perl update/bug-fixing strategy is to upgrade older
packages to newer versions. 

Here, %dist is a massive relief to maintain specs, because each the
perl-installation directories diverge between releases.

It's the same wrt. your packages, e.g. there would not be any EVR probs
with your firefox packages if you'd apply %dist.

Ralf