On Wed, 23 Mar 2005, Ajay Sharma wrote:
> IMO, stuff like SpamAssassin and Clam Antivirus can't be kept in a 5
> year release-cycle. I've found some major show-stopper bugs with
> SpamAssassin 2.x that were corrected in 3.x. So while I use CentOS
> to keep 99% of the packages in a stable release cycle, I update a
> few packages manually. And it's super easy to build an RPM for
> SpamAssassin:
>
> Grab the latest tarball, install the rpm-devel package and then:
>
> rpmbuild -tb Mail-SpamAssassin-3.0.2.tar.gz
Red Hat or CentOS packages that have an epoch set can be problematic
in this regard, since %{EPOCH} trumps %{VERSION}-%{RELEASE} when it
comes to upgrades. I was surprised at how many packages have explicit
epochs. On CentOS 4.0, some are quite high: aspell-en weighs in at 50!
Try it yourself:
# to sort by epoch
rpm -qa --qf '%{EPOCH}: %{NAME}\n' | grep '^[0-9]' | sort -n
# sort by package name
rpm -qa --qf '%{EPOCH}: %{NAME}\n' | grep '^[0-9]' | sort -t' ' -k 2
If you build your own packages, make sure that you set the epoch to
the same level as the officially released packages; otherwise, your
yum or up2date operations may mistakenly revert packages.
--Paul Heinlein <heinlein@xxxxxxxxxx>
