mc in rawhide now uses 4.6.1a as it's version, despite the fact that the used tarball is a *pre* 4.6.1 one. Please retract the rpms with this version from rawhide and continue using 4.6.1-0.x. If you do this soon you might not need to use an epoch, which would be a very ugly and unnecessary solution. Some people will have to upgrade using an --oldpackage this way, but few people will be affected right now. The longer you wait the bigger you will make the problem, which will most likely result in you being unable to avoid an epoch. Ugh :-( .
It turns out this was introduced in CVS by pchel on December 3rd. Sorry for blaming you. Still it's always a good idea to be critical, and notify upstream when they screw up (like with this versioning). This issue of course still needs to be resolved here.
Looking closer into this I found this is indeed your mistake after all. You are updating from the wrong branch. pchel has split off a new HEAD branch for testing purposes, which is called 4.6.1a, because it will become 4.6.2-pre after the release. You should be doing cvs update -r MC_4_6_1_PRE *not* cvs update for the creation of your pre 4.6.1 tarballs.
Hi Leonard, I'll keep 4.6.1a in rawhide because I'm not sure when the next official mc (if any) will be released. It fortunately doesn't contain much experimental code that I was afraid of as far as I have diffed the both branches soon after they were splitted 3rd Dec. The added code is safe. You should also bear in mind things like this: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/mc-devel/2005-January/msg00068.html where I see the actual development likely comes to HEAD and I'm afraid that with PRE we would be stuck with development for a long time. Jindrich