On 2013-03-29, Tomas Mraz <tmraz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I can imagine only one reason for this desire - so that the user can do > just "yum install foo" when he just wants the latest version of "foo". > Basically yes. It's call for semantically separeted API identifier. Now you have NEVRA string: What's Name good for? To match upstream name. Putting suffixes to achieve multiversion as done now is confusing and cannot be handled by machines. What's Version good for? To match upstream version. What's Release good for? To allow packagers to update the same version. What's Epoch good for? To work around if upstream screws version up. Pure theorethically we could melt EVR into one unstructured number. But we don't do that because it would be confusing. What's Architecture good for? To allow multilib. To install more instances of the same version. And yum ignores Architecture on purpose. But don't tell anybody that. Otherwise he could not claim we do not implement parallel installation. Where we have API? Nowhere because Fedora assumes only one version of a package. API should work like Architecture in sense of parallel instalability, but it shouls provide name spacing for EVR string. API itself should define orderding to allow selecting latest package across all builds as already commmentd: > I can imagine only one reason for this desire - so that the user can do > just "yum install foo" when he just wants the latest version of "foo". > What I can see as a possible solution is the following (whether the > desire above is really worth implementing it is another question): > Add a new field to the current NEVR fields called for example Branch. > Yes the Branch is what I called API above. It's what Gentoo portage calls slot. It allows picking highest or best fitting package. It allows breaking library API without breaking run-time. It allows seemless introduction and retirement of APIs. -- Petr -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
