RH updates on external packages

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Thiers Botelho <thiers at 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.
-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.