Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 58941
Why does rpm think new libxml packages is older?
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:39:14 EDT
jik:/usr/src/packages/new!351> rpm -U --test libxml-1.8.17-1.i386.rpm package libxml-1.8.16-3 (which is newer than libxml-1.8.17-1) is already installed
Because I forgot to set the Epoch (this thing drives me nuts !). Daniel
rpm isn't the only package to be fooled. A number of gnome packages rely on gnome-config to report their version number. For most packages, gnome-config in turn calls /usr/lib/<LIBRARY>Conf.sh to obtain the information. These latter scripts typically return a literal string into MODVERSION. In at least the libxml-1.8.17-2.i386.rpm, libgnomeprint15-0.30-4.i386.rpm, and libole2-0.2.4-2.i386.rpm packages from RedHat, and I suspect in others, the <LIBRARY>Conf.sh has been omitted. After installing the package, gnome-config continues to report the older version which has been upgraded. I'm beginning to think that the version information resides in too many places. Keeping them synchronised has become too difficult. We need exactly one standardised way to report version numbers, built right into the code so that it can't be spoofed.
Gnome config is for compilation issues. The epoch and rpm versionning are at the binary package level. They are different issues. Anyway libxml is getting deprecated, libxml2 is the package to use. I don't expect to make any new libxml (version 1) release at this point so the problem should vanish by itself, Daniel