make force-tag gone

[Jerry James]

On 2008/9/14 Todd Zullinger <tmz at pobox.com> wrote:
> I'm not arguing in favor of force-tag removal.  However, bumping the
> release number like this is pretty much required if you have to
> rebuild a package in an older branch, which can happen for various
> reasons.  I don't see what's ugly or kludgy about ensuring that the
> n-v-r remains less than what is in the devel branch.

I've wondered for awhile now why Fedora uses such a complex versioning
scheme.  The upstream version numbers should be informative, not
normative.  The right way to do it is to have a three part version
number: [distribution version number]-[# of builds for this
distribution number]-[upstream version number], where the last part is
for the user's information only; i.e., it does not play into version
number comparisons.  This lets you deal with rolling back to a
previous upstream release without needing Epochs.  It lets you fix a
problem that manifests in one distribution version only without having
to touch the others.  You NEVER have upgrade problems because the
distribution version number is the most significant part.  It lets you
give upstream's exact version number, even if it contains hyphens (a
problem I've had to deal with twice now).  It makes everything so much
simpler.  Not that it isn't way too late now to change, but how did we
wind up with all this unnecessary complexity?

This wasn't directed at you, Todd.  The thread just made me think of it again.
-- 
Jerry James
http://loganjerry.googlepages.com/