Once upon a time, Thiers Botelho thiers@fosfertil-ultrafertil.com.br said:
I couldn't find anything there on the topic ( http://iptables.org/files/changes-iptables-1.2.9.txt ) ; then it downed on
me that the Fedora update was 1.2.9-1.0 - this trailing _1.0_ suffix was nowhere to be found on iptables.org (I might as well have missed something there).
That is how RPM versioning works. The above package breaks down into:
Name: iptables Version: 1.2.9 Release: 1.0
(there is something else called an epoch that can figure in, but don't worry about that right now).
The version is generally the upstream (i.e. people who actually wrote the software) version. The release is something specific to the RPM package. That way, if an error is discovered in the packaging, or the upstream releases a patch (maybe without releasing a new version) or someone else produces a useful patch, the RPM release can be raised without changing the version (because it is still based on the same upstream version).
For example, say a bug is found in the current FC1 iptables package. Maybe that bug is FC specific, or the upstream maintainers don't consider it necessary to release 1.2.10 at this point. Instead, the package maintainer (someone at Red Hat right now, but that won't always be true) can release a new RPM, iptables-1.2.9-1.1 (or iptables-1.2.9-2). This is still a package based on the iptables.org 1.2.9 version, but a new release of that package for FC1.