[CentOS] rpm building and hyphens in Version tags

Wed Jun 9 14:09:14 UTC 2010
JohnS <jses27 at gmail.com>

On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 05:58 -0400, R P Herrold wrote:

> Again ?  'very little info' ? Goodness I've written this post 
> a lot of times and Google remembers many of them -- look 
> using: rpmvercmp

About 9,490 results (0.35 seconds)  and on so little of them are correct
and up to date.

> What I was saying was: a hyphen in a RELEASE tag is malformed 
> under the rules that RPM enforces, and the use of the explicit 
> -n opton in the %setup stanza will solve the matter to get at 
> an unpacked tarball.  Same goes for a hypehn in the VERSION 
> tag.  The script I posted should be a general shell decoder 
> ring, honoring the delimiter sets in Red Hat derived space

Saw the script.

> But wait, as it gets worse.  Collation sequences can conflict 
> as to what is a well-formed 'sequence' between various 
> national languages, and within a language over time ... In 
> part of my family's past there is a Danish branch, and the 
> letter pair 'aa' seeming can in some cases sort after 'z' so a 
> well ordered list of animal types might go either at the 
> front, or the end of this list, depending on the 
> pronounciation:
> 
>  	aardvark
>  	bee
>  	cat
>  	...
>  	yack
>  	zebra
>  	aardvark

> 
> The functional dominance of the english collation sequence 
> seems widespread in the FOSS that I see, but I remember a huge 
> fedora fight about package nameing using more than the 
> ASCII-127 A-Za-z0-9[.-_] subset ... [6]

Well you have the solution to that.  As in since you seem to like
Anthropology and Family History.  Predictions.  Prediction sequences can
and should derive the correct version for upgrade.  All though this is
only really done in databases like Postgres and MySQL via API.  R may
seem to be a good fit.  If nothing else theres nothing wrong with some
fancy inline .asm.  Would it work? I do not know.  I would have to get
hacking.  This does work with Genealogy btw.  

Teaser: my status update uses an assembly Kernel API.

> Not using embedded spaces or forward or back slashes seems 
> sensible to me (as a person who swims in *nix file names -- 
> Mac people regularly embed spaces and specials in file names; 
> the vast confusion in doing phone support and simply 'saying' 
> a URL and getting a remote person to strike: '/' vs '\' to get 
> to a page is so galling, due to a certain company thinking it 
> needed a special filesystem path delimiter -- but is it 
> 'wrong'?), but ...

Yes a huge problem.

> Thus: Don't fight City Hall; use -n in the %setup stanze
>  	and move on

Nice post. Would like to see more like this from you.

John