%{?dist}, recommended or optional?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sat, 07 Jan 2006 19:31:53 +0330, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> On Sat, 2006-01-07 at 15:38 +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > (Btw, for distribution upgrades, which don't perform an online upgrade of
> > Fedora Extras packages prior to first boot, using %{dist} is insufficent.
> > [Same applies to CD based distribution upgrades. Any Fedora Extras update
> > package for the older distribution version may be seen as newer than a CD
> > snapshot copy of a Fedora Extras package for the newer distribution, e.g.
> > 4.fc3 > 1.fc4, so while %{dist} is helpful for our current Fedora Extras
> > online repository, it is not a silver bullet.])
> 
> Why not use fc3.4 and fc4.1 then? ;)

Because it would create real mess. It would make the dist tag be the
most-significant portion of the package revision number. Have fun with
versioned dependencies (!), versioned obsoletes and friends. It would also
lead to comparing numbers to letters, distribution version versus package
revision. E.g. 1 > fc3. In particular, there's no return once you
increased release beyond 'f', which would happen for ever user who
rebuilds a src.rpm without having %{?dist} defined. Only increasing
%version or %epoch would be a way out.