Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 471988
[Feature request] beta and alpha productnumber values
Last modified: 2010-11-23 22:58:09 EST
Description of problem: Some products have ambiguous beta version names, some have downright crazy release schedules and some have written codenames for prerelease versions. In order to make maintainable beta versions which can be uploaded to the staging server in a sane fashion (ie not emailing release engineering 3 times a week) I propose that strings not entirely made up of numbers default to a productnumber value of zero. Using productnumber=0 presently works displaying a value of 0 in the title field. This feature request propose that the text in productnumber be written to the title field and the number 0 is used for the RPM file and brew values. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): .38 Additional info: Should be an easy feature to add and Brian has agreed.
I don't like this approach, if someone makes a typo in productnumber then PROD_VERSION gets set to a value they aren't expecting. I think it would be better to allow users to override PROD_VERSION in the books Makefile. The list of values we might consider letting people override are: DOCNAME (from title) PRODUCT (from productname) PROD_VERSION (from productnumber) RPM_VERSION (from edition) RPM_RELEASE (from pubsnumber) We would still enforce the current validity checks on these over ridden values, but not on the xml fields.
it's a fix. Sounds good. Make it so.
After talking with Brian we agreed that the correct solution for this issue is to add a remark to the subtitle tag, enable remarks and use the other fields as normal. e.g in en-US/Book_Info.xml: <subtitle>Everything in a nutshell<remark> 1.1 BETA 2</remark></subtitle> in Makefile: SHOW_REMARKS = 1 This displays the software's status in a clear, public location and ensures there is no ambiguity in the RPM subsystem's operation.