Should redhat-release be versioned or unversioned?

[Adam Williamson]

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
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