On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 13:30 -0800, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
Hi
> Yes; but you still have the rpm revision number. I
> am arguing for its
> removal entirely. That's one less spurious thing
> you see in a diff
> between branches, and one less thing to merge
> conflict on.
can such things be done without breaking compatibility ?
In short, yes.
I see no serious problems with taking a snapshot of the source tree and
generating a compatible SRPM. It's trivial to regenerate the Release:
and Version: headers from the package build database. The changelog can
be generated from the RCS history.
Keeping compatibility with PatchN: is a bit harder since with a modern
RCS, you can e.g. add a binary file in a branch. But if you limit your
branches to what can be expressed by diff, then you just do a checkout
of the patch-branch, do a diff, and stick in a PatchN line.
One thing that should be clear is that by using a revision control
system for RPM packaging, we've already conceptually broken
compatibility because the SRPM is no longer the preferred form of
modification, to use the GPL terminology.