Improve the way rpm decides what is newer

[drago01]

On Sat, Nov 21, 2009 at 3:17 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2009-11-21 at 00:58 +0100, Christian Iseli wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> I also got bitten by the "FC11 packages 'newer' than FC12" hickup, and
>> while going through the yum remove/add maneuver I pondered:
>> - is there ever a time when, while upgrading from Fedora n to Fedora
>>   n+1 I would expect a package .fcn to be kept instead of getting
>>   the .fcn+1 instance ?
>> My answer was: no
>>
>> So I wondered if there would be a simple way to make this happen
>> regardless of whether a maintainer blunders and gets things slightly
>> out of sync between the 2 or 3 current Fedora releases.
>
> To me, this is the wrong fix. The problem here isn't RPM's version
> comparison logic, which is perfectly sound. Instead of nerfing up RPM
> comparisons, which are already full of enough hidden mines, we should
> just improve Fedora's package versioning conventions so this doesn't
> happen, or at least happens less often.

We should just use release epochs, people might hate them for whatever
reasons, but they would easily prevent such issues from happing.