RPM 4.10 released [LWN.net]

RPM 4.10 released

Posted May 28, 2012 14:48 UTC (Mon) by jamesh (guest, #1159)
In reply to: RPM 4.10 released by vonbrand
Parent article: RPM 4.10 released

Well, I described a technical reason for the Debian behaviour in a parent post.

If I have a foo_2.3.4-0.rc5 package, its corresponding source package would consist of the files:

foo_2.3.4-0.rc5.dsc
foo_2.3.4-0.rc5.diff.gz
foo_2.3.4.orig.tar.gz

If I have a foo_2.3.4-1 package, its corresponding source package would consist of the following files:

foo_2.3.4-1.dsc
foo_2.3.4-1.diff.gz
foo_2.3.4.orig.tar.gz

If the two packages were built off of different pristine source tarballs, then they could not co-exist in the same package archive since they depend on different contents for foo_2.3.4.orig.tar.gz.

The fact you only need a single copy of the pristine source is great when the packages really are based off of the same tarball, but it can't handle this kind of case. For that, you need some way to represent "a version that sorts just before 2.3.4" in the upstream version component of the package version number.

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RPM 4.10 released

Posted May 28, 2012 20:07 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

rpm separates the upstream source file name from the package versioning (you can define the source name from package metadata, but it's not a hard link), so you don't need to play games to reuse the same files

Now really the pre-version is put at the end of the rpm package version because that's the last element to sort when comparing packages (name-epoch-version-release), I suppose it could be made explicit with a new metadata field for informational version strings (sorted after name, epoch, software version, package release), but few people seem to miss it right now