On Wed, 2013-12-18 at 14:56 -0600, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
While looking at bug 1044675 I noticed that redhat-release is
unversioned
in fedora-release and versioned in generic-release. I would expect it
to be the same in both of these packages. I think it probably makes the
most sense to version it for anything that is still using that, but wanted
to check if other people had good reasons for doing it one way or the
other.
I've already looked into this. The only reason I didn't fix it already
is that generic-release's tarball is secret sauce, there's no
instructions on generating it in the spec file.
I asked spot and he sent me a short reply saying, basically, 'copy the
stuff from the fedora-release tarball'. So I guess I'll hack something
together if no-one else does.
I don't think there's any good reason for the discrepancy.
fedora-release was set to obsolete redhat-release when it was
introduced, and given an un-versioned Provides: redhat-release . That
was back in 2006. generic-release had the same thing done in 2008 - I
don't know if that's when generic-release was invented, or if it was
found later that it needed to obsolete and provide redhat-release.
Different people did them, two years apart; one chose to version the
provide, one didn't. I'm guessing each was simply following their usual
procedure.
The bug I was looking at was
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1040607 , where the
redhat-release provide being versioned caused a problem (whereas in your
case it was the other way around).
I agree it makes sense for them to match, to provide maximum similarity
of behaviour, but we shouldn't version fedora-release's as
{version}-{release} if we make them versioned, it appears! Either both
unversioned, or both versioned just {version}, I think.
P.S. To resolve the actual problem, I am going to change a reference
from redhat-release to system-release, which probably should have
happened a while ago.
Who the hell knows? I've lost track of how many different provides: and
little files in /etc we have to perform the same job (answering the
question 'what is this here OS?') It seems to be getting a bit
ludicrous.
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net