[CentOS-devel] Confusing package versioning

[Ned Slider]

On 04/05/11 16:52, Karanbir Singh wrote:
> On 05/04/2011 03:51 PM, David Hollis wrote:
>> Would httpd-2.2.3-45.el5_6.centos.1 possibly be more appropriate (albeit
>
> not really. Look at it from the point of view of what that el5_6
> represents upstream.
>

The issue here is a) it's different from upstream, and b) you're not 
being consistent as you rebuild some packages with the el5_6 style dist 
tag but not for others.

> also, Ned if you look back at the history of the RHEL platform you will
> see that the actual tag isnt used in update comparisons.
>

Maybe, but I'm not sure if that is not more through luck than judgement?

For example, look back at:

httpd-2.2.3-11.el5_1.3.src.rpm

and

httpd-2.2.3-11.el5_2.4.src.rpm

here el5_2.4 > el5_1.3

The current CentOS scheme survives by the fact that .4 > .3 rather than 
by virtue of the el5_2 > el5_1 portion of the release that takes 
precedence in the upstream release. Admittedly that is the only such 
example I can find for the httpd package, and it does date back to 2008.

Is that intentional on the part of upstream? I doubt we'll ever know the 
answer to that.