Release tag conventions (Was: rpms/libnc-dap/devel libnc-dap.spec, 1.3, 1.4)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 03 Mar 2006 10:41:17 -0500, Ed Hill wrote:

> If you go back through the email list archives there was a long
> discussion about not relying on the fact that:
> 
>   fc3 < fc4 < fc5
> 
> when rpm and yum (and other tools) do comparisons of the EVR.  So, you
> are in fact violating our long-debated (way too long-debated, IMHO)
> policy.

Now this is interesting unless I misunderstand this comment. ;) Surely the
majority of packagers rely on %{?dist} in exactly the way you describe
above. One spec, a unique %{release} value and

  .fc3 < .fc4 < .fc5

as the dist tag.

[Not to jump back to the old discussions, but the dist tag is insufficient
in several cases. Not limited to CD-based releases and snapshot
releases. Like "upgrade from up-to-date FC4 plus Extras to a copy of stock
FC5 plus Extras found in a magazine" -- FC4 updates could be newer than
stock FC5. Or "upgrade FC4 to FC5 via CD, but needing to wait for firstboot
for online updates of Extras". In a slightly better world, all packages
for one distribution release would be seen as older than all packages for
the next release for the lifetime of both distributions, regardless of
whether with or without updates. And that is not trivial to do -- unless
we introduced a %{distepoch}, hehe.]