Broken upgrade paths

[Tom 'spot' Callaway]

On Thu, 2006-07-20 at 00:51 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Jesse Keating <jkeating at redhat.com> writes:
> >  pkg                  FC5                       devel
> 
> >  elinks               elinks-0.11.0-2.3         elinks-0.11.1-4.1
> >  gawk                 gawk-3.1.5-6.3            gawk-3.1.5-11
> >  gnome-applet-vm      gnome-applet-vm-0.0.7-2   gnome-applet-vm-0.1.0-0.rc1
> >  lockdev              lockdev-1.0.1-9.2.1       lockdev-1.0.1-10
> >  lslk                 lslk-1.29-16.2.1          lslk-1.29-17
> >  lsof                 lsof-4.77-1               lsof-4.78-1
> >  procinfo             procinfo-18-18.2.2        procinfo-18-19
> >  procps               procps-3.2.6-3.5          procps-3.2.7-3
> >  psmisc               psmisc-22.2-1.1           psmisc-22.2-5
> >  readahead            readahead-1.2-2           readahead-1.3-1
> >  rsh                  rsh-0.17-34.1             rsh-0.17-35
> >  sudo                 sudo-1.6.8p12-4.1         sudo-1.6.8p12-7
> >  util-linux           util-linux-2.13-0.20.4    util-linux-2.13-0.33
> >  vlock                vlock-1.3-22.2.1          vlock-1.3-23
> >  words                words-3.0-8.1             words-3.0-9
> >  am-utils             am-utils-6.1.3-1.2.1      am-utils-6.1.5-3
> 
> I must need to go back to RPM school, because AFAICS the devel version
> should be considered newer in every one of those cases.  What's the
> problem exactly?

RPM doesn't really treat these numbers as integers. Instead of treating
that . as a decimal separator for a whole number like our brain does, it
just treats it as a string.

so, 18.2.2 is > 19 for rpm, because it is a longer string.

(This is a drastic oversimplification, but it should serve the purpose)

The best way to avoid this problem? Keep your Release field as a whole
number, then rpm knows that 18 < 19.

~spot
-- 
Tom "spot" Callaway: Red Hat Technical Team Lead || GPG ID: 93054260
Fedora Extras Steering Committee Member (RPM Standards and Practices)
Aurora Linux Project Leader: http://auroralinux.org
Lemurs, llamas, and sparcs, oh my!