[Fedora-packaging] PackageNamingGuidelines comments

[Elliot Lee]

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005, Matthias Saou wrote:

> A bit more seriously, though. I really don't like epoch... Sure, it exists
> for the reason you state, but the current guideline is by far the most sane
> one we can all agree on, not only for inter-repo compatibility.
> For instance, what are you going to do when the package is named 1.0-beta1
> (and there are lots like this), as rpm doesn't allow dashes in the version?
> You're going to have to do something a bit ugly to your %{version} and
> %{source} lines at the least... and in the end, it saves some headaches to
> simply use a 0.something release tag for upstream pre-release of a given
> %{version} and tuck the details in that "something" part.

You're definitely right that there will always be some special cases, and
we'll have to deal them on a one-by-one basis. In that particular special
case, I'd prefer to use "1.0beta1" as the version.

However, the existence of this special case above doesn't prove that epoch
is bad or the wrong way to handle things. It's important to keep the users
in mind - their package searching and updating lives would be made a lot
easier if the Version: is as close to upstream whenever possible.

-- Elliot