Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 50803
Add version number to the %{DISTRIBUTION} tag
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:00 EDT
Description of Problem: This is more like a feature request for your building environment, not for the rpm-build package itself. Rpms shipped with RedHat 7.1 has this DISTRIBUTION tag value: # rpm -q --queryformat "%{DISTRIBUTION}\n" bash Red Hat Linux I think that it would be great if the rh version number also was added to this tag (optioanlly add a DISTRIBUTIONVERSION tag) like this # rpm -q --queryformat "%{DISTRIBUTION}\n" bash Red Hat Linux 7.1 rh is not binary compatible between (major) versions. You already have the depency checking for this but I think it would be a nice feature. It would be nice to use when querying rpms which is not yet installed I hope this will be considered before the next rh release. How Reproducible: Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual Results: Expected Results: Additional Information:
Adding some way of detecting binary incompatibilities is needed, but Distribution: is not the answer because: 1) packages built from one Red Hat distribution are frequently shipped with another distribution. 2) there's a whole lot of variance in the values taken on by the Distribution tag, even for Red Hat packages. Basically, you can't trust what's in the Distribution: tag. 3) Distribution is pure mechanism, there's no clear semantics for when/if/how "binary compatibile" should be reflected in a changed Distribution: version.