Basic questions

[John Dennis]

On Sat, 2005-03-19 at 13:06 -1000, Warren Togami wrote: 
> >  Releases for different distros
> > 
> >    Say I wanted to update the fontforge package for both the 
> >    devel branch and for the FC-3 branch. Presumably, I want
> >    to make sure that the devel version number is always newer
> >    than the FC-3 version number so that people can do intro-distro
> >    upgrades and get the rebuilt version. How do I achieve this?
> > 
> >    One system I've used in the past (for Fedora Core / RHEL errata)
> >    is to say, call the devel version:
> >  
> >      mypackage-1.0-1.fc4
> > 
> >    Then backport to FC3 as:
> >      
> >      mypackage-1.0-1.fc3
> > 
> >    If I have fix specific to the FC3 package, I might then number 
> >    the new version as:
> > 
> >      mypackage-1.0-1.fc3.1
> > 
> >    Is it reasonable to do something like this for extras? Is there 
> >    a standard?
> 
> Do whatever works.  This scheme does work for FC, so it will work fine 
> here.  Just be consistent for that package.

I'm one of those folks who does not share the view the ad hoc naming of 
packages in FC (RHEL) works in practice. When its the responsibility of
the developer to keep all the versions between distributions correct its
way too easy for human error to creep in. Plus the ad hoc, every package
is different, with its own naming methodology is very confusing, both
for humans and tools.

I wish we could use a computer to assign the versions (and tags) so that
its consistent within a package, across all packages in a distribution,
and across all distributions and have a database of this information
that can be queried.
-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>