RPM upgrade discussion

[Warren Togami]

As we discussed earlier, Fedora Legacy will require an upgrade of rpm as 
a requirement for all users who choose to use our repository.  It is 
quite clear that we agree upon the rpm upgrade for RH8 and RH9 due to 
the major stability problems associated with those versions.  Any RPM 
upgrade that is included will only be done so after extensive testing 
and verification that it does not introduce any other problems.

Unanswered Questions for Discussion:
1) What changed about the rpm epoch promotion behavior between rpm-4.2 
and rpm-4.2.1?  Can somebody please explain this with details and 
concrete examples?  I need to understand why we need to keep the old 
promotion behavior for the RH9 rpm upgrade as some have mentioned earlier.

2) Should we upgrade to rpm-4.2.x for RH7.x?  While the benefit for 
apt-get would be minimal, the benefit for yum would be immense as that 
would enable the use of yum-2.x.  Another key benefit would be 
compatibility with the newer RPM GPG signatures.

3) Which specific RPM versions should we use?  In my personal experience 
rpm-4.2-1 from rpm.org and rpm-4.2.1 from FC1 both work very well on 
RH9, while rpm-4.1.1 works great on RH8, although librpm404-4.0.5 is 
needed to maintain compatibilty with some packaging tools of that era.

Should we upgrade to rpm-4.2.x on RH7.x, RH8 and RH9, or use the above 
mentioned versions?

Axel do you have any improvements to rpm-4.2.x series for the older 
distributions that we should include?  I understand that you have a set 
of very well tested rpm upgrades.

Warren