From: Morten Kjeldgaard mok@bioxray.dk

I am a bit puzzled at the versioning scheme of the RedHat clone family. RedHat seems to use integer 4, Tao and Centos does the same. If you do rpm -q --qf '%{version}\n' -f /etc/redhat-release you get '4'. However, Scientific Linux uses 4.0, and that seems to me to be a more logical choise, since presumable there are going to be versions 4.1, 4.2, etc.

Unfortunately, the "release" file impacts build environments. E.g., dist-tag. So it shouldn't be done on a dime.

Even Red Hat has really pulled some doozers -- like getting rid of revisions, restarting the numbering on Fedora Core to 1 which threw a wrench into the dist-tag through Red Hat Linux 9, etc...

[ I can only assume there was a more important, legal reason, like not showing product lineage to protect Red Hat(R)? ]

-- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org