Improve the way rpm decides what is newer

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:31:27 -0500, Tony wrote:

> On 09-11-21 06:40:45, drago01 wrote:
>  ...
> > You misunderstood me, I was not suggesting adding another epoch but
> > simply bump the %{epoch}  for every release.
> 
> If this were really important to do, just putting the release first in 
> the version would take care of it without dragging in Epochs.

That's %build number (= super-Epoch) style:

  1-2.10 < 2-2.10 < 3-2.10 < 4-2.20 <  5-2.3 (!)  < 6-2.31 < 7-2.40
  ... [a year later] ... 1337-3.0 < 1338-3.0 < 1339-3.10

[Alternatively with %dist being higher than %version or higher than %build.]

What would you make the file names look like?

> Epoch is the big hammer, and is troublesome to use in practice.

Remember that you need to consider %epoch in any explicitly version
Requires/BuildRequires/Obsoletes/Conflicts, too.

Requires: foo > 2.10

would become what to get accurate? And considering upstream's versioning
scheme flaw where 2.3 followed 2.20. Once you add a kind of Epoch to
that dependency, you don't want it to update often, as every bump of
an Epoch-like value can invalidate a versioned dependency. Nasty.