Comment 1 for bug 633208

Revision history for this message
Jeff Johnson (n3npq) wrote : Re: comparisons without release

This bug was orignally identified by Mancoosi WP5 last December.

The bug is that Conflicts: assertions are not correctly verified when
the Release field is missing.

The impact is small because most RPM based distros tend
not to use Conflicts: assertions. The fact that the issue has
NEVER been reported or noticed (the bug has existed since rpm-3.0.2)
also indicates that the problem has low impact.

Adding an explicit version (and removing the missing value) is
likely the easiest solution because the behavior for Conflicts:
comparison is correct for all versions of RPM.

There are multiple patches that fix the problem attached to the Mandriva bug.

Since the root cause is behavior of a Conflicts: assertion with a missing value,
the returned boolean value is arbitrarily/conventionally defined.

The patch from @rpm5.org if/when the necessary QA to identify affected packages
across multiple distros can be done. I personally think the problem is minor
(because there is a workaround by adding an explicit release to the comparison)
and becuase its more important to be bug-compatible with existing behavor
than to be logically correct. Behavior with missing values for any assertion checker
is always conventionally defined.