On disttags (was: Choosing rpm-release for fc1 and fdr add-on rpms)

[Alexandre Oliva]

On May 18, 2004, Rex Dieter <rdieter at math.unl.edu> wrote:

> On Tue, 18 May 2004, Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> Oh, that's what you want disttags for?  Sorry, but it isn't going to
>> work.

> I disagree, it certainly can work, if used properly.  This is exactly 
> what many 3rd party repos are doing *right now*.

Yeah, but they do it in a totally different way.

The way 3rd party repos do it is to have the very same sources built
for multiple OS versions.

The way updates may be created is to take whatever shipped, install
the patch that fixes the problem and rebuild that.  This is more work,
but it reduces the risk of instabilities and undesirable changes that
upgrading to a newer version of the package represents.

Sure enough, Fedora Core updates aren't required to follow the
procedures that used to be followed for Red Hat Linux errata, and that
are still followed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but sometimes it's
just the right thing to do.

>> I suppose this is going to result in foo-1.2-7.fc3.1, foo-1.2-9.fc4.1
>> and foo-1.2-10.fc5 (rawhide), all of them containing the fix.  You
>> can't just use the version tag to identify packages containing the
>> fix.

> I think you miss the point.  The point is to be able to release the 
> "fixed" version as:
> foo-1.2-10.%{dist_tag} 
> Isn't that *much* cleaner/simpler than your 7.fc3, 9.fc4, 10.fc5 example?

It sort-of implies you use the same sources for all of the different
OSs.  This isn't necessarily a good idea.  So the approach doesn't
work in the general case.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva             http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer   aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist  oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}