[ATrpms-users] OT: Exclude Package with Smart

[Phil Schaffner]

On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 17:49 -0500, John Welch wrote:
> > On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 15:52 -0600, Axel Thimm wrote:
>         > BTW the reason 2.0.4 is considered newer than 2.1 is because
>         it has a
>         > so called epoch of "1".
...
> 2) I saw the "-1" at the end of each package name (didn't know it was
> called the epoch) and thought that might be the reason it wanted to
> install them. 

The -1 at the end is not the epoch.  The epoch is not normally displayed
by RPM (or smart IIRC) but is generally denoted by a leading
"<epoch-number>:", e.g. for my FC6 system:

# rpm -qa --qf "%{EPOCH}:%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}-%{ARCH}\n" | grep -i office | sort -n
1:openoffice.org-calc-2.0.4-5.5.10-i386
1:openoffice.org-core-2.0.4-5.5.10-i386
1:openoffice.org-draw-2.0.4-5.5.10-i386
1:openoffice.org-graphicfilter-2.0.4-5.5.10-i386
1:openoffice.org-impress-2.0.4-5.5.10-i386
1:openoffice.org-math-2.0.4-5.5.10-i386
1:openoffice.org-writer-2.0.4-5.5.10-i386
1:openoffice.org-xsltfilter-2.0.4-5.5.10-i386

but

# rpm -q openoffice.org-core
openoffice.org-core-2.0.4-5.5.10

Epoch is displayed by yum search or info options in various forms.

> Are these packages truly newer (better, more functionality, etc.) than
> the "official" OO packages, or is this just a way to trick the system
> into keeping the Fedora packages?

Epochs are seemingly used for the latter purpose regardless of any
newer/better claims/judgments, and are considered a "necessary evil" by
some, or just "evil" by others.  :-)

One more thought on your update problems.  I seem to recall OOo using
different package naming conventions than Fedora/RedHat in the past.
Are you sure the package names - exclusive of versions/epochs are
consistent between OOo and Fedora packages?  Might try the above
%{EPOCH} query on your system.

pHIL