On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 01:20:28PM -0500, Michael K. Johnson wrote:
On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 08:44:37AM +0100, Axel Thimm wrote:
> But tags need to be standardized, and there was a looong and mostly
No, they don't. Not necessarily. When the tag is there for the
convenience of the packager, it's the packager's job (within reason)
to select the tag.
On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 08:11:18PM +0100, Enrico Scholz wrote:
Such non-standardized tags will cause conflicts with automatic
buildsystems. For a clean update-path a disttag-change is needed for new
releases. What do you think happens at mass-rebuilds (e.g. rh9* -> fc1
transition) when every packager chooses an own disttag-scheme? Either,
the packager would have to resubmit a new version (inclusive the QA
trail) or the buildmaster would have to change the tags manually.
I agree, and to give another picture, imagine some packager eventually
finding his currently used scheme inadequate, but would only be able
to depart from it with epoch bumps, resulting in more versioning
desasters.
Both methods are not really an option, imo...
On Wed, Nov 26, 2003 at 02:44:13PM -0500, Michael K. Johnson wrote:
Sorry, I think I was operating on insufficient context. I was
stuck in the base distribution -- Fedora Core, not third party
repositories. Please excuse that...
Even within the Red Hat ecosystem a standardized way to tag concurrent
versions for different distros would not hurt. Currently it is really
up to the (
redhat.com) packager to decide on versioning. This freedom
is sometimes used like an artistic freedom (yes, packagers are artists ;)
Before I give any more pronouncements on this, I'd like to more
carefully study the issues.
Versioning (including disttags, epoch avoidance etc) should be
standardized in any context IMHO. Of course there is more demand for
doing so, if one needs to do often concurrent builds, which is not the
main component in RH's development models (only a few common errata
need to be treat that way from RH' POV).
Even if RH itself does not see great benefits in using disttags, they
certainly do not hurt. And if the need for non-RH community content,
like fedora-legacy or external repos is acknowledged, RH should be
interested in having a common scheme, because - how do your
marketing/sales folks say - it's important to have "one face to the
customer" ;)
--
Axel.Thimm(a)physik.fu-berlin.de