Kind request: Set release version to "10"

[Mike A. Harris]

On Mon, 6 Oct 2003, Axel Thimm wrote:

>On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 07:19:08PM +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:
>> A few observations: In your repository I don't see a consistent
>> platform specific release tag scheme.
>
>check the dates and the discussion on fedora.us in March/April (yes, I
>was once a fedora member).
>
>The fact is that there still is no versioning scheme one can rely
>upon. The scheme we discussed with fedora.us in March/April is now
>broken.
>
>The main issue is, that RH need to come up with a consistent scheme
>(not only for fedora but also including fedora legacy), or bless an
>existing one.
>
>Currently there is no schem that will work:
>o either the upgrade paths are broken, e.g. rh9 -> fc1/fdr1
>o or rpm bugs are triggered, e.g. rhXX -> numbers
>o Red Hat policy is violated, e.g. rh9 -> rh10
>
>I understand RH's marketing and company policy, I won't join the "free
>beer" group, but I would like the policy to not spoil technical
>issues.

This has to do with marketing.

However, to stay in tune with the actual problem you're 
having....


Reading the thread, it is aparent to me that many people who read
it and responded, did not completely listen to the problem which
you are describing.  Numerous people completely misunderstood
what you are trying to say, or purposefully chose to not read
everything and attempt to understand it.  I read your emails
fairly carefully however and believe I understand you correctly.  
Without renaming or reversioning the distribution (which is just
straight plain and simple not going to happen period for any
reason short of an Act of God(TM)), there is another extremely
simple solution.  Simply add an additional digit in front of the
normal modifier you use to indicate your special packages.

For example:

RHL 8.0:  foo-1.2.3-3.rh80
RHL 9  :  foo-1.2.3-3.rh90
FC  1  :  foo-1.2.3-3.1fc1 or foo-1.2.3-3.0fc1 or 
          foo-1.2.3-3.1.fc1

Using this scheme, all of the packages with fc1 in their names 
are considered newer by RPM than the RHL 9 or 8.0 packages above 
them.  No Epoch specifier is needed, no reason that the 
distribution naming/versioning scheme we've chosen to go with 
will break your packages.  It may require some getting used to, 
but the problem is trivially solveable by you for your package 
repositories, and by others with their package repositories.

The reason this works, is because when rpm goes to compare 2 
packages to see which is newer, it compares based on name + epoch 
+ version + release.  The version and release fields are compared 
like this (this is fairly oversimplified):

It breaks the release field into multiple parts on field
boundaries. A field boundary occurs when the next character
transitions from alpha to numeric or numeric to alpha, or by an
optional "." or "_" delimiter character[1].  Numerals are 
considered higher than alphabetic characters in a given field 
number.

So taking the 3 examples above and splitting them up into fields 
and comparing them, we have:

Release    Field1  Field2  Field3  Field4
3.rh80       3      rh       80     N/A
3.rh90       3      rh       90     N/A
3.0fc1       3      0        fc      1
3.1fc1       3      1        fc      1
3.1.fc1      3      1        fc      1

Field 1 matches for all of them so comparison proceeds to field 
2, in which case 1 is newer than 0, which is newer than "rh", so 
the fc1 packages are all newer than both the rh80 and rh90 
packages.

Problem solved.

Hope this helps.
TTYL


[1] There may be other delimiters I'm forgetting also, but I'm
not trying to be 100% complete here to what the rpm source code
handles, just trying to give a fairly terse example.  In general,
it is best to stick to using only numeric and alphabetic
characters and ".".  When in doubt, consult RPM documentation,
and source code for the complete gory details if one requires
more advanced knowledge than my terse description provides.

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