[CentOS-devel] Confusing package versioning

On Friday, May 06, 2011 11:02:27 AM Johnny Hughes wrote:
> On 05/05/2011 12:49 PM, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > ... I likewise, not really having been aware of this before, am confused why you would want to throw away (or relocate) the '_3' and '_4' in the modified source RPM's versioning.  And it has nothing, in my mind, to do with the EVR comparison; it has to do with being able to correlate the centos-modified source RPM with the upstream source RPM from which the centos version is derived.

> Upstream has said that they would not number in that manner ... now that
> they are doing so with some packages, that is, indeed, a problem.

Well, it seems to me (but I'm not one impacted by the versioning, to change or not to change is irrelevant to my current needs, unless the versioning breaks updates, since 'yum update' should "Just Work" without issue) that, to be fully bug-for-bug compatible, even though this versioning is 'buggy' in its usage, propagating it downstream would be desireable.  But it would be interesting to see how many would be affected either way, since there's probably not too many delve into the Release field at that level.  

And perhaps it's time for a bugzilla.r.c bug report on the versioning.... although I think that bug would not have a high likelihood of seeing any attention, since it doesn't affect upstream's updating or source correlation.

But if it's low-hanging fruit to match release from upstream with the .centos. addition for modified source RPMs, then it seems to me to be a worthy thing to do, even for C5, but.... after C6 is out.