On Thu, 2004-07-01 at 13:22, Stan Bubrouski wrote:
Release : 1,FC2,1 <---- What is this??????????????
Please don't continue using these Release strings, all it does it break things...
We've been having an internal discussion recently about how to make the release field meaningful. In the past it was typically an integer, which had no meaning in the context of multiple simultaneous distributions. In the last year or two some packages have started encoding strings into the release such as AS, RHEL3, FC1, etc. Is it this practice you are referring to in general or the specific case cited above? What specifically is breaking?
No assumptions should be made about the format of the release string other than it collate correctly when presented to rpmvercmp (the comparison function in rpm which has specific well defined semantics).
For what its worth, it's been noted that it is a deficiency n-v-r does not contain build information within a distribution. Using simple integers as the release yields arbitrary mappings of integers to distributions and builds(patches, errata) within a given distribution.
Unfortunately we are pretty much stuck with n-v-r for historical reasons. However it is felt the r part of n-v-r can be encoded with more information while preserving n-v-r format which many utilities have come to expect.
Are you experiencing a problem with a utility that is expecting the r part of n-v-r to be numeric or a utility that is not using rmpvercmp or implementing the logic in rpmvercmp?