pre-release kernel release tag

[Jarod Wilson]

Axel Thimm wrote:
> 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> ;)

Yes, there's history behind why the "0." convention is in the packaging
guidelines, but I still maintain that the 3rd-party history has/had zero
bearing on the decision to use it in the kernel package.

> 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.

I think your distaste of resetting the build tag is the real sticking
point here. The main reason for "0.<buildtag>" in pre-release versioning
is because the majority of people *are* fans of resetting the build tag.

> 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 ;)

True, true... rh9 -> fc1, fc6 -> f7... :)

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jwilson at redhat.com


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