Disttag for Fedora 7 and beyond

[Axel Thimm]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 02:54:05PM +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > How many packagers have been bitten by Requires: foo >= 2.0.1 while
> > they really needed foo >= 17:2.0.1 
> 
> Users, not packagers.

That's the same, or if one get's bitten he bites the next in the food
chain ;)

> For everyone else including packagers, in the distribution there is
> only one package "foo" [...]

Nah, that's an arghument against having versioned dependencies at all,
which is not what we want.

> > and the next update needed at least 23:3.0.  E.g. the epoch
> > inflation everywhere make it mandatory to start checking all your
> > versioned BRs and
> 
> Versioned BRs are not affected, since the RPM Epoch never specifies an
> API version.

What makes you say this? How about epoch of the perl package itself?
They very much define the ABI/API in this case by themselves.
Furthermore the automated perl dependencies that by definition lack an
epoch, can become an indirect BR quite easily ...

Ask the people that had to cope with the epochs in perl itself, that
required special handling in all perl dependency detection and that
creates redundant parts of redhat-rpm-config that we cannot send back
upstream, because any epochs are non-portable. So we get to sit on all
the special handling stuff and this just for automatic depedencies for
perl the package.

Now for perl-foo-bar with an epoch the same story would need to get
repeated, e.g. a requires on foo::bar greater than 1.0 one would need
to lookup the table and check whether the user meant >= 1:0.03, >=
2:0.1, and map that bakc into the dependency generation. But noone
want to do that pain again, so the depencny remains broken until
noticed.

Anyway: If epoch were an acronym, the E would stand for Evil.

> Epochs are not evil. Even the old explicit "Epoch: 0" policy solved
> more problems [of an epoch promotion bug in rpm] than it created,

Ouch, no, let me respectfully disagree 100%. That broke apt, the only
depsolver back in these days, and until we knew what it was it created
an epoch inflation never seen again since. And it did solve nothing,
because the problem was in comparing epoch "none" vs epoch "0", and
guess what: There were no packages with explict epoch "0" back then.

Anyway we're getting off-topic. If you consider epochs to not be evil,
that's OK, we need someone to defend the accused ;)
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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