[repo-coord] disttags, useful?? (was Re: python 2.3 for RH7.3)

[Jeff Pitman]

On Monday 20 December 2004 05:53, Dag Wieers wrote:
> > possible. Having such a mechanism would deprecate the entire idea
> > of having disttags, making our Release munges a lot more
> > manageable.
>
> Smart may be a solution, but disttags don't really harm. I'm not sure
> why people think disttags or repotags are harmful and should be
> removed from Release tags.

Not harmful, per se, they're just very misleading.  Especially now that 
fc2 packages are applicable to the fc3 distribution.  It certainly 
makes no sense to use it when a package applies to multiple distros-- 
noarch is an extreme example where I think we all agree that dropping 
this is OK.  

Before, when running a dist-upgrade from rh9 to fc2, I found a bunch of 
"rpm -qa | grep rh9" packages littering the rpm package landscape.  It 
was a great thing to have this indicator since several programs I used 
daily were in a broken state after that upgrade.  The observations I 
found--which I have shared a few times--are: 1) package renames, 2) 
package dropped or moved to another repo, 3) repenting of epoch, etc.

To truly do a dist-upgrade, one must "prep" the system, so to speak, to 
take care of issues with the change in system.  At this point, one must 
apt-get install addthis rmthat- addver=2.3.1-2 rmthis-, etc. to get it 
in a sane state where a full dist-upgrade can successfully occur.  
(This is where the freshrpms "apt-shell" discussion is leading to.)

Therefore, if the only reason a disttag exists is to facilitate a 
forward distribution upgrade, then I believe we are wasting time 
arguing about the syntax when the semantics can't even address the 
issues at hand.  What can address them is more intelligence in higher 
level package handlers such as smart or apt-get.  (I'd include yum, but 
the author as a negative stance on dealing with dist-upgrade issues.)

Anyhoo... most of this doesn't really matter except for the fact the 
accelerated schedule in Fedora releases.  Having a solid, workable 
dist-upgrade solution would make a lot of users extremely happy! ;) I 
just don't see disttags leading us there.

take care,
-- 
-jeff