On Mon, Oct 07, 2019 at 08:08:56PM -0400, Alexander Scheel wrote:
> Without modularity, RPM doesn't offer a good way to choose
between different
> versions of the same thing. One can squash version numbers into the name,
> which covers some use cases, but also becomes unwieldy and loses the _idea_
> that these things are different branches of the same basic software.
This is not true at all.
For starters, if you have parallel packages available [0], `rpm -i` will
let you install them all just fine and track each individually [1]. When
you go to uninstall it (`rpm -e rpm-test`), it'll complain that you didn't
specify which one [2], so you'll of course have to specify a version [3].
If you then go stick it in a repo, DNF will show you the highest version,
which is expected since DNF generally concerns itself with the updated-ness
of your system [4]. But you can always pass --showduplicates to show the
older versions. And nothing prevents you from selecting a different version
of the package if they exist in the repo [5]. The one place this fails
is that DNF will perform an upgrade, removing the older version, even if you
choose install [6].
What if you want to apply a bugfix (or security update) to both of those
packages? How would that work?
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader