On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 06:47:13PM +0200, Nils Philippsen wrote: > On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 14:19, Axel Thimm wrote: > > On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 01:37:45PM +0200, Nils Philippsen wrote: > > > > Projects very near to Fedora Core (not "3rd party") like Fedora > > > > Extras predecessor fedora.us, and fedoralegacy.org do require more > > > > often to have common builds differentiating in the release built > > > > against. So disttags are required. > > > > > > Not necessarily. When discussing build systems, more than once the idea > > > popped up that the maintainer shouldn't care about the release and that > > > it would be autogenerated. These kind of build systems would be fed from > > > a revision control system where you would put different distro-versions > > > into different branches. How the build system generates release tags > > > from that is a matter of discussion, but nothing the package maintainer > > > should have to care for then. > > > > Hm, I'd argue that the release tag is often quite important (the > > buildid before the disttag), because it can be referred to from other > > package in dependencies. E.g. when you move a file from one package to > > another or have any special new releationship between packages than > > need to Conflict/Require something based on the release tag. > > You can always use the releasetag generated by the build system for > this. If it is coming from an SCM and is immediatly retrievable, it's OK. If you had to wait for a rawhide build to see your release tag to use in further dependencies that would be less useful. > > That's another point where disttags are useful. If you fix your > > package foo to foo-1.2.3-5.fc1 and foo-1.2.3-5.fc2, you can safely use > > only > > > > # foo up to 1.2.3-4 was buggy > > Requires: foo >= 1.2.3-5 > > > > without mentining any disttags in the packages bar-6.7.8-9.fc1 and > > bar-6.7.8-9.fc2, e.g. the disttag does not have to be mentioned in > > dependencies. A scheme with manual coding of upgrade paths would > > require different specfiles for bar-6.7.8-9.fc1 and bar-6.7.8-9.fc2 as > > the dependencies would have to written differently. > > Agreed, but this is only true in the special case where you use the same > version/release across all dists. That's exactly what disttags are good for. And it is not a too special case outside of Red Hat. Almost all 3rd party repos support more than one release and package the same upstream version/same patches multiple times. The closest examples are fedora.us and fedoralegacy. Both these projects and the rest of the repos would benefit greatly from a canonical introduction of disttags. And there is no drawback (aesthetics put aside, but we have already lost the beauty price, so let's try for the technology award ;). -- Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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