[Open-scap] Question on version

[Steve Grubb]

On Monday, March 9, 2020 2:46:05 PM EDT Kilaru Sambaiah wrote:
> I have a question in interpreting version in oval file.
> perl-suidperl is earlier than 4:5.8.8-40.el5_9
> What is the significance of 4:, the version of file I need to look for
> is 5.8.8-40 on el5_9

There is a hidden epoch field that is used in case someone needs to force a 
rollback to a previous version.

You can see it like this:

# rpm -q --queryformat "%{EPOCH}:%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}\n" shadow-utils
2:4.6-17.fc31

-Steve