Provide better support for versioned RPMs

[voxik]

It is pretty common to provide versioned RPMs. E.g. in Fedora, there are nodejs20, nodejs18, python3.x packages, there were added versioned postgresql16 packages recently, etc. And I wonder if RPM could provide some basic support to help with this scenario.

The most common issue is that typically, there is need for two "package names", the original non versioned as well as versioned, e.g. %{name} and %{pkg_name}. The versioned name is typically constructed from some other major/minor/teeny version macros used as an suffix or prefix (in case of SCL). However, which macro contains what value varies. And that is due to sub-package naming.

The standard way is that the package declares just the suffix to the main package name. However, for the versioned rpms, it depends if the main package name is versioned or not, this means that the suffixes work just fine or all package names needs to be fully named.

So I think that in short, what I am looking for is a way to have the versioned name and a switch, which would tell RPM to use the versioned name for the sub-packages.

BTW I think that what is also interesting with the versioned packages is that the "main package" might not be shipped. That is for example case of the nodejs20 package in Fedora, where the main binary package is named nodejs. Therefore I wonder, is there a change to make the "main package" less significant? Maybe it should be declared by %package declaration and treated similarly to other sub-packages.

[voxik]

BTW looking around, %source_name used e.g. here might be interesting concept and that is what I was aiming at in the last paragraph.