On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, Warren Togami wrote:
> Just a personal opinion that this might confuse people, and if a
> better name can be chosen that is short enough and clear, it
> might be better.
Hmmm, I am in agreement. While we fedora.us people had no problem with
vepoch for many months, I can see where it is confusing. I designed the
name to be "Kind of like epoch, vepoch trumps all, but less."
Perhaps "patchlevel" is a better word.
I'm not sure patchlevel gives the right visual either.. It
implies something to do with the number of patches being applied,
or the version of a patch or something.
> I strongly agree with this approach. Probably because I stole it
> from bero, and I think you picked it up from me or from bero
> also. ;o) It works very well IMHO. It's also very useful with
> CVS based releases where you can embed the CVS date into the
> release field instead of the version field, thus avoiding having
> to use Epoch later on to override the large integer release
> number from a CVS date.
Yes, when I originally designed this method I was pointing at bero's
packages as justification. "See! Look, Red Hat did it!"
Yeah, this is a very good way to work around a not uncommon
problem.
Err... you are completely right about it not being necessary in the
post-release case. I am not sure why our fedora.us policy retained that
even though it was unnecessary for all these months. The way I
understand the older version of rpm broken rpmvercmp behavior, this
wouldn't be a problem with those versions too.
Ah. RHL 7.2 shipped with rpm-4.0.3-1.03, and 7.3 shipped with
rpm-4.0.4-7x.18, both of which don't have this problem. rpm
4.0.4 is the current erratum for all distribution releases from
RHL 7.0 and later (or a newer version of rpm). Older versions
aparently did have the problem according to other mails I
received, but I think it's safe to say that distro releases
supported by Fedora are unaffected, and that at least as far
back as a properly updated 7.0 system should also be unaffected.
RHL 6.2 seems to have an older rpm version which may or may not
be affected, but I think that's outside the care zone. ;o)
> Ick. Underscores in version/release are hideous IMHO. I'd
use
> "." instead of "_". Your comment at the top of this section
> indicates a ".", so perhaps you just made a typo, and sequence of
> cut and paste errors? ;o)
Oops. Yeah, fedora.us original plan was ".", however some here on
fedora-devel-list argued toward "_" as a more clear separator between
the patchlevel and disttag because it can be confusing with so many "."
Hmm. Good point. Perhaps it just needs some getting used to.
I personally actually prefer the "." separator, but I really
don't care
which is chosen.
I suppose if it's a useful thing to people that we should keep an
open mind about it, even if it is ugly. ;o)
--
Mike A. Harris
ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat