The reason for appending distro name to package version?

[karelbilek]

Hello,

we are building our own forks of pdns.

I am thinking, what is the purpose of appending the distro name to the version of the package? As you do here

https://github.com/PowerDNS/pdns-builder/blob/16bc1604c48821c12b708d7afa88d9612ebdd0da/helpers/build-debs.sh#L69

If I remove it (for our own fork packaging), will things break? :)

[Habbie]

If you ever upgrade your distro, you'll have to figure out if your '4.8.4' is for Pokedistro Pikachu or Mewtwo or Leopold. Having the suffix in there solves this problem. Also, some repo management tools (like reprepro, which we use for .deb repos) don't even allow reuse of version numbers between distributions. If you look at Debian/Ubuntu upstream version numbers for packages, you'll also notice that they sometimes add something like a deb12u suffix to distinguish it from the same version built for, say, deb 11.

[karelbilek]

I see.

We have a slight problem now, because bullseye to bookworm is now registered as a downgrade, because it's lower in alphabet.

I see that debian packages (in debian repos) don't have this problem, as they have numbers.

[Habbie]

that is exactly why we switched to numbers, but we did not do it early enough for bu->bo

[karelbilek]

@Habbie Ahhh! That's great.

Since I am making fork from stable branch, I did not see this. Is it safe to use the updated builder repo with stable release? (I guess I will just try it)

[Habbie]

I think that should just work, but you'll find out :)

[karelbilek]

Yes it works. Thanks for the reply!