Disttag for Fedora 7 and beyond

[Tim Jackson]

Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-01-05 at 10:25 +0100, Axel Thimm wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 09:55:50AM +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
>>> Start using stricter versioning with Epoch bumps as necessary,
>> Ouch! Anything but epochs!
> 
> Why?  I keep hearing epochs are the spawn of satan.  It's just a
> number... why are they so bad?

One reason is that they're opaque to several common use cases, with
current RPM versions.

Neither "rpm -q" nor "rpm -qi" show Epochs. Neither are epochs included
in RPM file names. Now arguably this is a problem with RPM rather than
with epochs, but until the defaults change in RPM it can make things
confusing and awkward.  Try explaining to a non-RPM expert why doing this:

rpm -i foo-1.0.i386.rpm
rpm -U foo-1.1.i386.rpm

gives an error about foo-1.1 being an older version. (in the case that
the Epoch on foo-1.1 is lower than that on foo-1.0)

Even though I'm a packager and I know about epochs, I still occasionally
have a head-scratching moment related to something like this.

Tim