%{?dist} (was: Re: Request for a sponsor and a review of: pam_abl)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 15 Jul 2005 14:41:37 +0800, Jeff Pitman wrote:

> On Thursday 14 July 2005 18:48, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > Mandatory dist tags give a false impression of upgrade-path safety.
> 
> *shrug* 
> 
> If they don't need disttags, that means they can move over across a dist 
> upgrade which gives a false impression of upgrade-path safety.

To allow for CD based installations/upgrades, a version jump for a
distribution upgrade would normally look like this,

  FC2: foo-1.0-1, Update: foo-1.0-1.2, foo-1.0-1.3
  FC3: foo-1.0-2, Update: foo-1.0-3
  FC4: foo-1.0-4

or similar, but with all version-release tuples for an older dist being
older than all version-release tuples for all newer dists. This scheme
is not aided by dist tags.

Btw, you've still not given a good reason why you want to enforce
%{?dist} on packagers. Where is the value in making it mandatory?