Re: Release rules Was: Re: [Monotone-devel] conflicts store vs show_conflicts

[Thomas Moschny]

Markus Wanner <address@hidden>:

> On 11/24/2010 03:20 AM, Timothy Brownawell wrote:
> > Also from IRC we have:
> >    <thm_> the whole release numbering discussion is not meaningful
> > wrt rpm, as Fedora for example has its own rules, forbidding
> >    non-numerics in the version part of an rpm.  
> 
> Really? There are so many open source projects with non-numeric
> versions that I distrust this statement. The first Google hit I get
> seems to indicate that non-numeric versions are perfectly supported
> in Fedora as well, see [1].

Time for a clarification of my note on IRC.

The well-known-to-Fedora-packagers website you are citing says, that
because of the ordering problems, a Fedora package may *not* have 
non-numeric parts (besides the dot, obviously) in the *version* part of
an RPM name. The website therefore deals with the question where to put
these non-numeric parts of a version number so many upstream projects
make use of: For any Fedora RPM they have to be put in the *release*
field of the RPM name, but prefixed by a number (and even two numbers
in case of a pre-release, the first of them being zero.)

For example, upstream uses: monotone-1.0rc1, and this is intended to be
a pre-release, then the first-attempt Fedora package would have to be
called "monotone-1.0-0.1.rc1", the second attempt
"monotone-1.0-0.2.rc1", the next release candidate maybe
"monotone-1.0-0.3.rc2", the final 1.0 package "monotone-1.0-1", and a
later devel package from trunk "monotone-1.0-2.20110229mtncafebabe".

So in short, what this packaging guideline basically does, is forcing
the maintainer to *manually* ensure proper ordering via the release
field.

Therefore, it is irrelevant what version scheme we (as monotone
upstream) come up with, I (as Fedora monotone packager) might have to
adopt it anyway to be consistent with the packaging guideline,

so we don't *need* to discuss (or take into account) any particularities
of RPM version number ordering here on this list.

Hope that clarifies it a bit,
Thomas

-- 
Thomas Moschny  <address@hidden>