Fedora Project launches Pre-Extras

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Sat, 18 Dec 2004 01:18:36 +0100, nodata <fedora at nodata.co.uk> wrote:
> I parse filenames for both version and repository information.

Are you an end-user facing tool?  I'm not talking about scripts you
maintain for yourself. I'm talking about tools that are produced for
other people to use. I'm pretty sure a lot of people do a lot of
clever things with script logic that is fragile and not behavior to be
encouraged or relied on.   For as much as we want to all believe
distags are a standard process...it isn't. Its a hack to work around
default settings in the rpmbuild setup.  And not all packagers are
using that hack yet either... some do...some don't.  Whether or not
having a disttag in the filename is not the issue. The issue is
polluting a release tag with non-comparable information because its
the quick and easy thing to do.

And I'm not talking about scripts used inside a buildsystem where the
build policy is clearly laid out to use disttag consistently....
whatever buildsystem that is using disttags consistently right now in
its build scripts to parse filenames can get the same behavior from
using a header tag and placing the header tag in the filename and
still get the same filename parsing.  This information does not belong
in the release tag which is used in version comparisons by librpm. 
Not being able to decided how to use an existing tag to keep this
information seperate is a copout.  Charles here has given you the
exact example on how to use a seperate tag to encode the exact same
filename without polluting the release tag.
The popular solution is a burden to the version-release comparison
process and it needs to be fixed.

-jef"what is right isn't always popular and what is popular isn't
always right"spaleta