pre-release kernel release tag

[Axel Thimm]

On Thu, Aug 09, 2007 at 11:22:08PM -0400, Jarod Wilson wrote:
> >Actually the 0. prefix is not neccessary it is a leftover from 3rd
> >party techniques to indicate vendor hierarchies, but it's difficult
> >to knock out people's head.
> 
> It has nothing to do with any 3rd-party techniques in the case. The 
> '0.#' instead of just '#' is so that we can rebase the release number to 
> 1 on each new major kernel version,

It has everything to do with 3rd parties and the key element here is
history: Many years ago we started to discuss the beginning of what
today became the packaging guidelines in fedora.us. One element was
what to do with packages that override the vendors' (RHL 6.x/7.x at
that time), especially when the vendor was shippijng foo-1 and one
would like to use foo-3.

So foo-3-0.whatever was considered as a hierachy solution to allow the
vendor to catch up with the 3rd party package w/o the vendor having to
coordinate build tags with the little 3rd party repos.

In reality many foo-1 -> foo-3 upgrades were for foo-3 = some
prerelease, so this idiom got confused for prepending a 0. to
prereleases.

So, "0." had a semantic wandering to land where it's used now, and the
beginnings were 3rd party techniques to auto-overide their own
packages when the vendor would update his.
</history_lesson> ;)

There is nothing wrong with not using "0." to mark prereleases, it's
just Fedora legacy/tradition. I'm not a fan of resetting the build tag
anyway.

But whatever the "0." the important thing is that the build tag (`#´)
remains in front even if today the sub-versioning scheme for the
kernel looks like it would automatically happen to fit in rpmvercmp
ordering. Another history lesson shows that once one thought a
versioning style would settle and work it is "usefully" extended in a
way as to break theis assumption ;)
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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