what's with the commas in the cyrus-imapd release tag?

[Bill Nottingham]

John Dennis (jdennis at redhat.com) said: 
> On Tue, 2004-08-03 at 15:36, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
> >   Subject says it all.  Is this a new naming convention, or did someone
> > fat finger the Release tag?  I haven't checked bugzilla yet, but just
> > figured I'd check to see if anyone else saw this.  It wouldn't matter to
> > me one way or the other, except that it confuses the heck out of yum:
> 
> Well, that's a shame. We've been trying to come up with ways to encode
> more information into the release field without breaking other tools.
> FWIW n-v-r use the final two hyphens to separate (delimit) the name,
> version, and release fields. Non-alphanumerics within each of those
> fields (e.g. punctuation) separates each of those fields into sub
> components that are pairwise compared for collating purposes (e.g.
> version comparison). The comma format in the release field adheres to
> these rules and parses and collates correctly using the version
> comparison mechanism in rpm while allowing us to encode more
> information.

Exactly how does a comman encode more information than a decimal
point? It's just a separator.

I know, we'll have RPM default to a comma or a decimal point as
the separator in use depending on the locale, and introduce
a %{separator} macro.

> It would be a shame to break a popular tool such as yum, but on the
> other hand encoding more information into the release component is such
> a worthy goal (we can debate its format) that perhaps we should consider
> in the near term enhancing yum's parsing logic to be consistent with the
> rules used by rpm.

Presumably having:

Requires: whizzbang = 2,3,1

is being encoded as:

Requires: whizzbang = 2
Requires: 3
Requires: 1

in the binary RPM.

Bill