Fedora Project launches Pre-Extras

[Dag Wieers]

On Sat, 18 Dec 2004, Jeff Spaleta wrote:

> On Sat, 18 Dec 2004 22:55:26 +0100 (CET), Dag Wieers <dag at wieers.com> wrote:
> 
> and do lots of stupid things... creating packaging standards that are
> not robust to stupid behavior  and rely on overloading tags used in
> version comparison with essentially non comparative information gets
> in the way.

It does not get in the way. You are seeing ghosts. You've been fed with 
wrong information.


> rpm needs to grok vendor strings and use vendor
> information accordingly when looking for upgrades in a seperate way
> than how the release tag is used to do alpha-numerical comparison.

Good luck. It will never happen and will never result in what my users and 
I want. And what Fedora needs. Fedora does not need a confusing sitation 
where you don't know where a package comes from if people paste you screen 
output or look at your package list.

In a lot of postings people could indicate what the problem was by the 
initial posting, I don't want to ask people to do a rpm -qa --qf 
'%{name} %{vendor}\n' to eventually get the right information.


> Here's my point. RPM was clearly NOT designed to deal with the concept
> of multiple vendors
> for the same packagename. this is the central problem. RPM needs to be
> fixed to incorporate a native understanding of vendor in how it
> calculates what an 'upgrade' means. We can continue to pretend that
> this isn't a problem and hack around the problem at a higher level....
> but the problem remains.  Forcing higher level tools to be 'smart'
> about the distrotags buried into release tag is just a hack on top of
> a hack.

You are confused now. The repotag has no other purpose than was stated in 
my 'advantages' document. It is not used by higher level tools. Here's the 
link again:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2004-December/msg00498.html

And the repotag is no problem. I've been using it for 2 years now, 
freshrpms, fedora.us and lots of others too and it has not lead to any 
problems. I'm afraid the problem is in your and Seth's mind basicly.


> > Jeff, I know you think as Fedora as only development. But breaking RPM
> > compatibility for something that does not make a difference is pretty
> > silly.
> 
> I think overloading tags with extra material that are meant to do a
> very specific alpha-numerical comparative task is bad design. The
> epoch,version, release serve specific purposes in how an update is
> calculated.... overloading any of these tags with information  not
> mean to be part of that calculation in a useful way is a breakdown.

It was not designed for it, but it serves for the purpose better than 
anything else.


> We should be using vendor or packager tags as seperate namespaces so
> that 'smarter' tools can objectively use the tags without affecting
> the alpha-numerical comparison calculations of ANY tool, including the
> rpm cli tool.

The repotag does not prevent other tools to do that. Go and get us an 
implementation that is acceptable for the different purposes and we'll 
talk again. As long as there's no alternative, we can talk and talk.

I foresee no solution to come out of whatever you try, but don't let me 
hold you back, please go for it.

--   dag wieers,  dag at wieers.com,  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]