Versioning svn checkouts [Was: Re: alpha/beta software in Fedora 8?]

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Petr Machata wrote:
> And maybe I fail to see the
> intent behind using the date in release tag of vcs-checkouted package.
> Perhaps it's just an arbitrary identifier.  But if the intent is
> anything close to making a life easier for whoever reconstructs the
> srpm, using the release number makes more sense than the date alone.
> 
After much discussion of exactly this point, the Packaging Committee 
decided that the date/revision id in release tag is not for 
reconstructing the srpm.  It's for consumers of the rpm to have a better 
idea of what they're getting.  For all vcs's a date is good for this as 
it tells the user they're getting a snapshot from a certain date.  For 
svn, and distributed vcs's that have an incrementing release number on a 
canonical branch the release number can be useful for those that are 
following upstream.  For vcs's that have only hash based ids there's 
really no reason to have the hash in the rpm release tag.

The need to identify how to reconstruct the srpm is still in place. 
However, instead of placing that information in the release tag, it 
should be either a comment or script in the source rpm as noted here:
 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/SourceURL#head-615f6271efb394ab340a93a6cf030f2d08cf0d49

-Toshio