On Fri, Mar 13, 2009, Gerry Reno wrote:
Manuel,
'bdist_rpm' is NOT broken. What is broken is packagers misuse of the
'version' and 'release' strings. They do stupid things like put
version='3.0' and release='rc1' and then wonder why their final release
cannot update the release candidate. THIS IS A TRAINING ISSUE...
This is a pretty good description of the cause of the problem,
but doesn't address a solution that may be used in software.
I deal mostly with building RPMs used under the OpenPKG portable
package management system which generally uses sane naming
conventions, at least as far as the release designations while
versions depend on the original package versions.
The attached bit of code is basically what we use to determine
the most recent packages, and works by splitting the version and
release into tuples of numeric and non-numeric parts, then
comparing these tuples. This is based on a recipe in the
O'Reilly Python Cookbook to sort file names containing numerics.
This seems to solve most of the problems of sorting RPM packages
on version and release, but might fail in places where there are
issues of case-sensitivity.
Bill
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