RPM building section of RHL's developer guide

[Matthias Saou]

Panu Matilainen wrote :

> Also I didn't notice any version handling guidelines. The Fedora project
> spent like 6 months creating a specification how to handle odd package
> versioning so that rpm can deal with them cleanly and there are *still*
> some unresolved bits. Much of the document is Fedora-specific but similar
> document about handling alphabets in version numbers etc would be good
> addition to the docs: http://www.fedora.us/wiki/PackageNamingGuidelines

The lack of "odd package versioning" is probably because that's yet another
topic many people don't want to touch even with a 20m pole, just like
introducing and handling epoch ;-)

>From what I can tell, RH doesn't seem so reluctant(?) to add epochs when
needed, unlike Fedora or me, as indeed they are the authoritative primary
source for packages, and breaking 3rd party compatibility isn't the same as
a 3rd party breaking compatibility with the main distro.
I personally wouldn't mind being headed in a direction where all included
packages have versions that match the upstream ones, even if this means a
possible epoch introduction later on, as long as there is an exhaustive
list of all RHL packages with their complete current n-e-v-r.
Maybe there are drawbacks that I'm missing though, in which case I'd really
like to know.

Matthias

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