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

[Nils Philippsen]

On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 14:19, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 01:37:45PM +0200, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> > > Projects very near to Fedora Core (not "3rd party") like Fedora
> > > Extras predecessor fedora.us, and fedoralegacy.org do require more
> > > often to have common builds differentiating in the release built
> > > against. So disttags are required.
> > 
> > Not necessarily. When discussing build systems, more than once the idea
> > popped up that the maintainer shouldn't care about the release and that
> > it would be autogenerated. These kind of build systems would be fed from
> > a revision control system where you would put different distro-versions
> > into different branches. How the build system generates release tags
> > from that is a matter of discussion, but nothing the package maintainer
> > should have to care for then.
> 
> Hm, I'd argue that the release tag is often quite important (the
> buildid before the disttag), because it can be referred to from other
> package in dependencies. E.g. when you move a file from one package to
> another or have any special new releationship between packages than
> need to Conflict/Require something based on the release tag.

You can always use the releasetag generated by the build system for
this.

> That's another point where disttags are useful. If you fix your
> package foo to foo-1.2.3-5.fc1 and foo-1.2.3-5.fc2, you can safely use
> only
> 
> # foo up to 1.2.3-4 was buggy
> Requires: foo >= 1.2.3-5
> 
> without mentining any disttags in the packages bar-6.7.8-9.fc1 and
> bar-6.7.8-9.fc2, e.g. the disttag does not have to be mentioned in
> dependencies. A scheme with manual coding of upgrade paths would
> require different specfiles for bar-6.7.8-9.fc1 and bar-6.7.8-9.fc2 as
> the dependencies would have to written differently.

Agreed, but this is only true in the special case where you use the same
version/release across all dists.

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    nphilipp at redhat.com
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 safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."     -- B. Franklin, 1759
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