On Wed, Oct 01, 2003 at 12:36:34PM -0400, Konstantin Riabitsev wrote:
On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 11:00, Axel Thimm wrote: Well, this is a piece of legacy that you have created for yourself. You have opted to use an unreliable way of providing "upgradeability" for the packages you ship that was never guaranteed to be a foolproof solution. It is not fair to demand that this system should be continued simply because you made a choice that might have seemed a good one in the past, but ended up creating unnecessary legacy out of which you cannot get out (or are unwilling).
You are getting me wrong here. I simply present a solution for concurrent repositories, e.g. having the same package (sourcewise) in RH7.3, RH8.0, RH9 and the next N releases. This is a problem that the Fedora Legacy will face sooner or later, and it's better faced now, where things can get fixed.
If one is interested in keeping sane upgrade paths between the supported releases, one will find the only way to do so is to generate rpms with VRs following this scheme:
foo-1.2.3-4<suffix1> foo-1.2.3-4<suffix2> foo-1.2.3-4<suffix3>
Making sure the ordering of the suffixN corresponds to the rpm upgrade path algorithm.
The natural way to create this suffix is to use the distro versioning number, but this has now broken. Note: not only for my repo, but for others as well, including fedora.us!
fedora.us is saving their day with a kludge: While previously the distro release was prepended by alphabetic characters ("rh"), they skip it for the new releases, as anything starting with "f" is rpm-older.
But this is already broken for Fedora Legacy, as older rpms do not sort properly numbers and alphabetic entries (its a bug fixed only rather recently). And even if it were, it still is a kludge to remove the distro identification of the rpm.
It was never guaranteed that the versioning of releases would remain consistent, and most packagers who have seen the jump from 8.0 to 9 have quickly realized that making the OS version part of their release is a very icky way of guaranteeing package upgradeability.
You've dug this hole for yourself, and I do not think it is fair to expect us all to jump down it.
Please see it constructively. Maybe you are not interested in supporting multiple distros, but other who are ("Fedora Lagacy") need a versioning scheme they can live with.
So please provide a better working scheme.