Warren's Package Naming Proposal - Revision 1

[Mike A. Harris]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, Warren Togami wrote:

>> Just a personal opinion that this might confuse people, and if a 
>> better name can be chosen that is short enough and clear, it 
>> might be better.
>
>Hmmm, I am in agreement.  While we fedora.us people had no problem with 
>vepoch for many months, I can see where it is confusing.  I designed the 
>name to be "Kind of like epoch, vepoch trumps all, but less."
>
>Perhaps "patchlevel" is a better word.

I'm not sure patchlevel gives the right visual either..  It 
implies something to do with the number of patches being applied, 
or the version of a patch or something.


>> I strongly agree with this approach.  Probably because I stole it 
>> from bero, and I think you picked it up from me or from bero 
>> also.  ;o)  It works very well IMHO.  It's also very useful with 
>> CVS based releases where you can embed the CVS date into the 
>> release field instead of the version field, thus avoiding having 
>> to use Epoch later on to override the large integer release 
>> number from a CVS date.
>
>Yes, when I originally designed this method I was pointing at bero's 
>packages as justification.  "See!  Look, Red Hat did it!"

Yeah, this is a very good way to work around a not uncommon 
problem.


>Err... you are completely right about it not being necessary in the 
>post-release case.  I am not sure why our fedora.us policy retained that 
>even though it was unnecessary for all these months.  The way I 
>understand the older version of rpm broken rpmvercmp behavior, this 
>wouldn't be a problem with those versions too.

Ah.  RHL 7.2 shipped with rpm-4.0.3-1.03, and 7.3 shipped with
rpm-4.0.4-7x.18, both of which don't have this problem.  rpm
4.0.4 is the current erratum for all distribution releases from
RHL 7.0 and later (or a newer version of rpm).  Older versions
aparently did have the problem according to other mails I
received, but I think it's safe to say that distro releases
supported by Fedora are unaffected, and that at least as far 
back as a properly updated 7.0 system should also be unaffected.

RHL 6.2 seems to have an older rpm version which may or may not 
be affected, but I think that's outside the care zone.  ;o)



>> Ick.  Underscores in version/release are hideous IMHO.  I'd use 
>> "." instead of "_".  Your comment at the top of this section 
>> indicates a ".", so perhaps you just made a typo, and sequence of 
>> cut and paste errors?  ;o)
>
>Oops.  Yeah, fedora.us original plan was ".", however some here on 
>fedora-devel-list argued toward "_" as a more clear separator between 
>the patchlevel and disttag because it can be confusing with so many "."

Hmm.  Good point.  Perhaps it just needs some getting used to.

>I personally actually prefer the "." separator, but I really don't care 
>which is chosen.

I suppose if it's a useful thing to people that we should keep an 
open mind about it, even if it is ugly.  ;o)



-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat