On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 12:27:57 -0500, John Dennis wrote: > On Fri, 2004-12-17 at 11:56, Dag Wieers wrote: > > If you use different repositories and there's no coordination, there's no > > proper way to compare the release tags anyway. The discussion about either > > the disttag or the vendortag are useless. > > I agree with Dag here, at the moment if one tries to compare packages > between two distinctly different distributions the comparison is > meaningless. While it may not be ideal the current mechanism makes > strong assumptions concerning common buildroots, a constraint difficult > to assert compliance with across differing distributions. While in > practice installing packages from different distributions might work > there is no assurance it will and no one likely would come to the rescue > should problems arise if one is engaged in this practice. > > That fact however does not diminish the usefulness of having the > distribution name encoded in the rpm name for the benefit of human > beings. It does however require for any given package in a given > distribution use a consistent naming scheme so as not to alter the > result of comparisons. It doesn't add any value. When you receive a bug report about foo-2.0-1.i386.rpm (assuming it's your package) and the reporter referred to foo-2.0-1 specifically (because the bugzilla form asks him to do so), have you ever verified whether it was really your package and not an arbitrary one found at rpmseek.com? Other example. Fedora.us used the 0.fdr prefix. After some time, in message boards, helpful users concluded that a package would be from fedora.us because it has .fdr in the package name. But there are other repositories and individuals who use the same repo tag, and everybody is free to use it too. The same applies to distribution tags. As long as '.FC3' and friends are not too common, they stand out when you look at a package name. As soon as many other packagers use the same dist tags, they don't add anything other than influencing RPM version comparison. -- Fedora Core release 3 (Heidelberg) - Linux 2.6.9-1.681_FC3 loadavg: 1.00 1.00 1.00