Call for comments - RPM upgrade

[Barry K. Nathan]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2003 at 09:19:45PM -1000, Warren Togami wrote:
> It is my opinion that RH8 and RH9 should be upgraded to the latest 
> versions for the respective distros.  Regarding Barry K. Nathan's 
> concern about the epoch promotion problem, could you please post a 
> concrete example of what triggers that problem?  The entire list needs a 
> refresher about exactly what this problem is.

It might be a few days before I get a chance to test and post a very
detailed example, but here's one possibility (not yet tested, but I
think it should reproduce the bug):

(a) Take a Red Hat 9 box, without Mozilla installed.
(b) Upgrade to RPM 4.2.1.
(c) Try to install the mozilla-* packages from RHL 9. Because of the
lack of epoch promotion, IIRC some of the mozilla-* packages will
conflict with other ones, and it will fail to install.

I remember that the Mozilla packages had to be corrected in rawhide in
order for rawhide's Mozilla to install properly with rpm 4.2.1. This was
bugzilla bug 97197 at one point.

I don't know what other packages in Red Hat 9 are similarly broken, but
I'm pretty sure there were others.

(BTW, in an earlier mail to this list I expressed concern about scary
"error" messages from up2date once rpm 4.0.5 is installed on Red Hat
7.x, but for reasons I'll explain later, I now think it's just cosmetic,
so I no longer object to upgrading RHL 7.3 to rpm 4.0.5.)

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