Fedora Project launches Pre-Extras

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Sat, 18 Dec 2004 22:55:26 +0100 (CET), Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com> wrote:
> Jeff, give an example where it confuses the version comparison or shut up.

Shall I construct an example using rpm -Fvh  using  packages using the
zork and zelda disttag thrown into a directory? the distrotags do
affect comparison if the distrotag continues to be a part of the
release tag.

Now you can say its silly to construct cases that put zork and zelda
packages in the same directory.... and i will say... users are stupid
and do lots of stupid things... creating packaging standards that are
not robust to stupid behavior  and rely on overloading tags used in
version comparison with essentially non comparative information gets
in the way. rpm needs to grok vendor strings and use vendor
information accordingly when looking for upgrades in a seperate way
than how the release tag is used to do alpha-numerical comparison.

Here's my point. RPM was clearly NOT designed to deal with the concept
of multiple vendors
for the same packagename. this is the central problem. RPM needs to be
fixed to incorporate a native understanding of vendor in how it
calculates what an 'upgrade' means. We can continue to pretend that
this isn't a problem and hack around the problem at a higher level....
but the problem remains.  Forcing higher level tools to be 'smart'
about the distrotags buried into release tag is just a hack on top of
a hack.

> Jeff, I know you think as Fedora as only development. But breaking RPM
> compatibility for something that does not make a difference is pretty
> silly.

I think overloading tags with extra material that are meant to do a
very specific alpha-numerical comparative task is bad design. The
epoch,version, release serve specific purposes in how an update is
calculated.... overloading any of these tags with information  not
mean to be part of that calculation in a useful way is a breakdown.

We should be using vendor or packager tags as seperate namespaces so
that 'smarter' tools can objectively use the tags without affecting
the alpha-numerical comparison calculations of ANY tool, including the
rpm cli tool.

-jef