RPM upgrade discussion

[Barry K. Nathan]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2003 at 11:36:45PM -1000, Warren Togami wrote:
> 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.

With rpm-4.2.1-0.30 installed on Red Hat 9:

[root at localhost RPMS]# rpm -q mozilla
mozilla-1.2.1-26
[root at localhost RPMS]# rpm -q mozilla-chat
package mozilla-chat is not installed
[root at localhost RPMS]# rpm -ivh mozilla-chat-1.2.1-26.i386.rpm 
error: Failed dependencies:
	mozilla = 1.2.1-26 is needed by mozilla-chat-1.2.1-26
[root at localhost RPMS]# 

With RPM 4.2.1, "mozilla = 1.2.1-26" means mozilla 1.2.1-26 with epoch
0. With RPM 4.2, "mozilla = 1.2.1-26" means mozilla 1.2.1-26 with any
epoch.

The new (4.2.1) behavior is more predictable, but it breaks backward
compatibility with old packages that have broken requirements
specifications (i.e., missing specific epochs when they're needed). If
we want to move Red Hat 8.0 and 9 over to the new behavior, we could
make new mozilla, etc. packages that work properly with RPM 4.2.1,
however.

-Barry K. Nathan <barryn at pobox.com>