Fedora Project launches Pre-Extras

[nodata]

On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 19:35 -0500, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> 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
> 
> 

If I download an rpm from anywhere and install it, I keep a copy of it.
Later, if I want to use any of the standard *nix commands to deal with
those rpms, I can do. For example, an ls *.dag.* shows me dag's rpms.

Not having an important piece of information like "where the rpm came
from" immediately seems a bit silly.

Sure rpmlib can get at the information, but that doesn't mean it
shouldn't be in the filename. People use filenames. Libraries can parse
the files.