Re: Proper metadata format

  Duncan Mac-Vicar Prett wrote:

> The standard is not very good documented. There are ongoing efforts on
> leverage rpm-md more as a documented standard.
...
> For epoch for example, I assume the tag is required, but SUSE ignores
> epochs for example when reading the data and feeding the solver.

Yum requires epoch to be set, which was why there was a new rule
added to later versions of RPM making epochs "0" and "(none)" equal.

This made it incompatible with older versions though, and an option:
      -n, --noepoch = don't add zero epochs for non-existent epochs
                     (incompatible with yum and smart but required for
                      systems with rpm < 4.2.1)

Smart handles either value of epoch, so that comment shouldn't
apply to smart anymore (to the 1.x releases at least), only Yum.
It does make things a littler stranger when the repodata doesn't
match the rpm --xml, i.e. when createrepo adds a zero epoch to it.

But for RPM itself, it doesn't really matter as the new rule is:
"A missing (unspecified) Epoch: is exactly equivalent to Epoch: 0."

--anders