On Mon, 9 Aug 2004, Mariusz Mazur wrote: > Was there a reason why epoch (which is the most important part of the whole > version tag) was never included in rpm file names? > This is only a guess, but because it would have broken various programs that did not expect it. That said there is a macro that defines how an rpm should be named when you build it such that you can make rpms you build have the epoch in the name. > And while I'm at it - can you think of any bad side-effects of using epoch to > differentate between major versions of a linux distro? I can't stop thinking > that it's a bad idea, but can't think of a reason why (it would make > upgrading from version to version of a distro a lot easier). > Because, typically, epoch is used to deal with radical changes to versions such that there would be no sane way to determine generically from the version that this package should upgrade another package. That said, if you used a different epoch per distro then you would have to have a different epoch per distro per major version format change. Other than that using to deliniate the distro would not give you what you wanted. Say RedHat had epoch 0, Fedora had epoch 1 and Suse epoch 2, then that would mean that a RedHat package would always win, but if you were on a Fedora or Suse system that is probably not what you want. Cheers...james _______________________________________________ Rpm-list mailing list Rpm-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rpm-list
