That ole Livna Problem/That ole VLC Problem

[Michael Schwendt]

On 18/01/2008, Nigel Henry <cave.dnb at tiscali.fr> wrote:
>
> Now I comment out freshrpms, and uncomment the livna repo.

I've shown just recently that the x264 package from livna is seen as
"older than" the package from freshrpms despite offering a newer
snapshot of the library. In other words, the older software
libx264.so.55 will upgrade the newer software libx264.so.56 due to how
the packages are versioned. And of course the change in the library
version additionally breaks package dependencies:

  $ rpmdev-vercmp 0 0.0.0 0.3.20070529.fc7   0 0 0.10.20070819.lvn8
  0:0.0.0-0.3.20070529.fc7 is newer

That translates to

Epoch: 0
Version: 0.0.0
Release: 0.3.20070529.fc7

compared with

Epoch: 0
Version: 0
Release: 0.10.20070819.lvn8

and is like that because "0.0.0" is higher than "0" in RPM version
comparison. Even if both packages used "Version: 0", it would be
necessary to agree on a common "Release" scheme as the date of the
software here is very important. Alternatively, creating a separate
namespace for every library major version would have worked, too.