On Tuesday, 06 April 2010, at 14:38:36 (+0100),
Rui Miguel Silva Seabra wrote:

> I'm sorry, but that breaks the whole point of having clean software
> installs.

How, exactly?

> It's definitely *not* a sane (in terms of package DB) replacement to the
> proper usage of the release field.

There is nothing improper about the current usage of the release
field.  Said usage varies radically from distro to distro and even
from package to package within the same distro.  Its purpose is to
provide an additional mechanism for distinguishing packages which may
correspond to an identical upstream version.  Beyond that (and not
containing a hyphen), it's open season.

The current method was chosen to simplify things for those building
periodic snapshots from SVN.  It serves that purpose very well by
providing the date of the snapshot in a readily readable, sequencable
form which (thanks to the 0. prefix) does not interfere with the
eventual release of the version in question.

> As can be read from the man page, it can even have dangerous results:
> 
> --force
>       Same as using --replacepkgs, --replacefiles, and --oldpackage.
> (...)
> --replacefiles
>       Install the packages even if  they  replace  files  from  other,
>       already installed, packages.

I never said you should use it all the time.  I said in the specific
case of installing a new version of an RPM that you previously
installed the same day while doing active development on a particular
package, using --force is a safe and easy way of accomplishing what
you want (installing RPM's during development) without interfering
with the other reasoning behind the naming convention.

I'm on the RPM5 development team.  I know exactly what --force does
and when to use it.

> As to the POV of users, they expect an incrementing value (which is also
> what the release field should/must have precisely so upgrades can be
> done sanely) and even if they don't recognize instantly date+hourmin,
> they surely recognize just as instantly an increasing value, so there is
> no point to raising such scarecrows.

Again, these spec files are intended for building snapshots from SVN
on a periodic basis, and we chose to provide something useful in the
release field in the form of a snapshot date.

> It's as made up statistic as claiming YYYYMMDD is a standard snapshot
> format.

ftp://ftp.openssl.org/snapshot/
http://www.mindrot.org/openssh_snap/
ftp://sourceware.org/pub/gcc/snapshots/
ftp://sourceware.org/pub/gdb/snapshots/current/
ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/glibc/snapshots/
http://www.gti.net/mirrors/postfix-release/experimental/
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/devrel/handbook/handbook.xml?part=3&chap=1#doc_chap3_sect5

Michael

-- 
Michael Jennings (a.k.a. KainX)  http://www.kainx.org/  <[email protected]>
Linux Server/Cluster Admin, LBL.gov       Author, Eterm (www.eterm.org)
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