On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 13:30 -0800, Rahul Sundaram wrote: > Hi > > Yes; but you still have the rpm revision number. I > > am arguing for its > > removal entirely. That's one less spurious thing > > you see in a diff > > between branches, and one less thing to merge > > conflict on. > > > can such things be done without breaking compatibility ? In short, yes. I see no serious problems with taking a snapshot of the source tree and generating a compatible SRPM. It's trivial to regenerate the Release: and Version: headers from the package build database. The changelog can be generated from the RCS history. Keeping compatibility with PatchN: is a bit harder since with a modern RCS, you can e.g. add a binary file in a branch. But if you limit your branches to what can be expressed by diff, then you just do a checkout of the patch-branch, do a diff, and stick in a PatchN line. One thing that should be clear is that by using a revision control system for RPM packaging, we've already conceptually broken compatibility because the SRPM is no longer the preferred form of modification, to use the GPL terminology.
