[Rpm-maint] RPM 4.10.0 alpha released

[Panu Matilainen]

On 03/20/2012 12:51 PM, Michael Schroeder wrote:
> Hi Panu!

Hi, and sorry about the late reply.

>
> On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 11:44:29AM +0200, Panu Matilainen wrote:
>> It's that time again, just a bit later than originally planned.
>> A new major release is coming up and while this could be considered a
>> rather boring release in terms of new features, there's been quite an
>> amount of internal churn so beginning at alpha, just in case. Unless
>> something totally unexpected happens I'm expecting this to hit final
>> within couple of months, ie it shouldn't be required to sit in the
>> stabilization chamber for very long.
>
> What about the tilde support patch? We discussed it for rpm-4.9.0,
> I think it's about time to apply it. (I'll do so for the next
> opensuse release anyway, just to force your hand a bit ;-) )
>
> I attached the patch again for your convenience.

The compatibility issue is what troubles me still. I skimmed through the 
4.9.x era discussions (which I'd pretty much forgotten about by now, 
duh) and I see it got more or less dismissed (inclusing by myself) on 
the grounds of the theoretical old packages having ~ versions in them 
being rare if existing at all. Which probably is true.

However the reverse case was (AFAICS) not really considered: once we 
explicitly allow the tilde usage to rather fundamentally change the 
version comparison, its the older rpm versions (and users) that will be 
confused by the new packages utilizing the new tilde semantics.

Of course we can just slap in a new rpmlib() dependency for packages 
with tilde in the version, that'll at least prevent older rpm's getting 
confused and provide a hint to users that it requires a newer rpm.
This ignores the possible old packages with tilde in version and there 
probably are further subtleties to consider, but with an added rpmlib() 
dependency to prevent the most obvious mixups, I think I could live with 
the rest.

	- Panu -