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Description of problem:
The Fedora Packaging Guidelines for snapshot versioning are in the process of being revised for Fedora 31 to leverage the new carat modifier for version comparison[1].

Currently, the proposed changes[1] assume that EL8 will not support this, and so there will be a fracture in how packaging snapshot versions will occur between EL8 and Fedora.

It would be great if this feature was backported into the EL8 rpm so that this doesn't happen, especially as EPEL 8 hasn't even launched yet.

The changes required[2] are relatively self-contained and should be easy to backport, as the patches came shortly after the 4.14 release.

By doing this, it will make it so that one of the biggest changes coming to the packaging guidelines will also remain compatible with EL8, supporting backports from Fedora into EL8 for years to come without having to do spec versioning rewrites or other weird things.

[1]: https://pagure.io/packaging-committee/pull-request/908
[2]: https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/pull/597

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
4.14.2-9.el8

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1654901 ***