[Rpm-maint] [rpm-software-management/rpm] Is it possible for an RPM package to have no version? (Discussion #2896)

[Shane Bishop]

### Context
Feel free to skip this context, and go straight to my question.

My team has written some software that uses librpm to retrieve the version and release for every RPM package installed on a system (we use `RPMTAG_VERSION` and `RPMTAG_RELEASE` respectively to retrieve this data). The software component on the host sends an event containing this data to a backend service that performs downstream processing on this data in order to meet the requirements of the larger application.

We have observed from our backend service's logs that there is a package that has an empty version string, and an empty release string. Specifically, this it the package information in the event our backend service flagged:
* Package name: "appdynamics-machine-agent"
* Epoch: "0"
* Version: ""
* Release: ""
* `SOURCERPM` value: "appdynamics-machine-agent---src.rpm"
* Vendor: "AppDynamics Inc"

The client-side software that generates the events has been distributed and is now running in production. We do not have access to the hosts, as the client runs on customer computers. Therefore, we are not free to SSH onto the host and run `rpm -qa --queryformat` to confirm the data in the event matches the data reported by `rpm` on the host itself.

### Some investigation that I have performed
I downloaded what I believe to be an RPM installer for the latest version of this package, and installed the package. I noticed that the data reported on the package by `rpm` is different than the data in the event I describe above:
```
$ rpm -qa --queryformat '%{NAME},%{EPOCH},%{VERSION},%{RELEASE},%{SOURCERPM},%{VENDOR}\n' | grep -i appdynamics
appdynamics-machine-agent,0,24.1.0.3984,1,appdynamics-machine-agent-24.1.0.3984-1-src.rpm,AppDynamics Inc
```
I believe the reason why the data is different is because I installed using a newer version of the RPM installer than our customer used when they installed the package on their system. I could not find anywhere on the AppDynamics website that I could download any older versions of the RPM installer.

I also tried building an RPM installer from a `.spec` file that omits the `Version` property, but I got the error `Version field must be present in package`. Perhaps this is just because omitting the `Version` is no longer legal in my version of `rpmbuild`, which is version 4.11.3.

### Question
Was it ever possible, at any point in the history of RPM, for a RPM package to be created without a version or a release?

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