On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 11:57 AM, Garrett Holmstrom
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 2011-09-13 12:26, Connie Sieh wrote:
>>
>> Note that %dist is defined in this rpm as
>>
>> %dist .el5
>>
>> which is commonly not what TUV uses for security errata.
>>
>> An example of this is
>>
>> xulrunner-1.9.2.22-1.el5_7.i386.rpm
>>
>> In the above case "%dist .el5_7" was needed.
>
> For those who are curious/confused, when upstream build a package against
> the master branch for a major release (i.e. the one that will be the next
> point release) the %dist tag is ".el5".  When they build a package from a
> maintenance branch for a given point release (e.g. for security errata) the
> %dist tag is instead ".el5_X", where X is a non-negative integer, because it
> builds against an older package set than the master branch.

And unfortunately, it can be confusing as all get-out for building
SRPM's for multiple releases. Subversion, for example, has different
dependencies in "el5" than in "el6", or in "f14" or later, and working
out the logic for selecting the right options for your OS is a bit of
an adventure when unpredictable and non-major-release "%dist" settings
are used.

You can check what it's set to at the moment by typing "rpm --showrc |
grep dist" in your working environment, which can be very helpful.