Release bumps in old branches

Ville Skyttä ville.skytta at iki.fi
Wed May 3 20:35:09 UTC 2006


Hi,

I've noticed that an increasing number of packagers are making the
mistake of bumping the release tag in older distro branches (only) so
that they become newer than the corresponding packages in newer branches
as far as rpm is concerned, which is not good wrt. distro upgrades.
I've sent some personal nagmails but it seems this issue requires wider
attention.

Scenario: foo = 1.0-1%{?dist} in FC-4 and FC-5, and only FC-4 needs a
fix.  One solution is to add a digit to the very right of the release
tag in FC-4, instead of bumping it the usual way.  IOW, 1%{?dist}.1, not
2%{?dist}.  Otherwise the situation becomes 1.0-2.fc4 > 1.0-1.fc5,
whereas 1.0-1.fc4.1 < 1.0-1.fc5 would be ok.  Another solution is to
bump all >= FC-4 branches to 2%{?dist} but that's wasteful for the newer
branches which wouldn't need the fix.

I don't remember if this is mentioned somewhere in the Wiki and I'm too
lazy to search right now, but if it's not there and there's a place
where packagers would be likely to find the note, adding it wouldn't be
a bad idea.

Checking for expected NEVR order between distro branches sounds like a
job for an automated script + public whinemail.  Does anyone happen to
have such a script or one that could be easily extended to do it already
available?




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