Use of %dist tag

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sun, 12 Jun 2005 12:37:05 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I was wondering about the %dist tag. Afaik the whole idea behind this 
> tag is to make sure that upgrades from one FC core + extras to the next 
> goes smooth even if the SPEC hasn't changed, so the new extras package 
> is just a rebuild of the old. Right?
> 
> And also to keep things sane when making changes to extras packages for 
> different release. Say we have FC3 and FC4.
> 
> Now xxx has to be newer in the FC4 repo then in FC3, so we have:
> FC3 xxx-1.0-2
> FC4 xxx-1.0-3
> 
> Now we need to fix a bug for both FC versions so what do we get now? 
> something like:
> FC3 xxx-1.0-2.1
> FC4 xxx-1.0-4
> 
> Because we can't make FC3-3 since that could cause problems for people 
> installing extras from CD's or the like right?

Not, IMO. Installing a Fedora Extras snapshot from CD integrated into
Anaconda or post-install/firstboot would not be any different with
dist tags. You could still run into things like

  FC3: extrapackage-1.0-1.fc3  (first release of package for FC3)
  FC3: extrapackage-1.0-3.fc3  (up-to-date through yum update)

then a CD based upgrade to FC4 + Extras

  FC4: extrapackage-1.0-2.fc4  (first release for FC4 on Extras CD)

and only the next yum update would fetch the latest

  FC4: extrapackage-1.0-3.fc4  (from online repository)

which would be newer than the installed build release 3.fc3.

> With dist tags we would get:
> FC3 xxx-1.0-2.fc3
> FC4 xxx-1.0-2.fc4
> 
> Now we need to fix a bug for both FC versions so now we get:
> FC3 xxx-1.0-3.fc3
> FC4 xxx-1.0-3.fc4
> 
> So to me using dist tags seems much cleaner. Now what I've read using 
> dist tags is not mandatory, but what is wise?

Not making them mandatory is wise. fedora-packaging list and other lists
long before that have discussed dist tags.