Release an rpm with a lower version than the existing one

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2013-07-12 at 08:35 +0200, Alejandro Alvarez Ayllon wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Not so long ago I took over an rpm called dpm-dsi, being the released 
> version 1.9.0.
> The release of that version was decided by upstream.
> 
> However, now upstream has decided to deprecate 1.9.0 for the moment 
> being, since they
> consider it not stable enough. And they want to release an 1.8.* version.
> 
> So my question is: can I build and push to updates a lower version of an 
> existing rpm,
> and overwrite the existing one?

Yes, if you use an Epoch. Using Epochs is generally considered bad form
as they're often 'hidden' in queries and, once you use one, you Can
Never Go Back, but occasionally it's necessary, and if there isn't
likely to be a new 1.9 release soon, it sounds like it may be necessary
in your case :/

An Epoch is basically an RPM versioning 'trump card'. No matter what the
version and release numbers of each build are, a build with an Epoch of
1 is *always* considered 'higher versioned' than a build with an Epoch
of 0, etc. (The initialism NEVR, which you'll see around the place,
stands for Name, Epoch, Version, Release).
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net