Bug#891216: seconded 891216: Requre d-devel consultation for epoch bump

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Wouter Verhelst writes ("Bug#891216: seconded 891216: Requre d-devel consultation for epoch bump"):
> I would oppose this change.
...
> Documenting why you should not use epochs in certain cases does make
> sense, but I think we should trust our developers to understand what
> they're being told, rather than requiring people uselessly email -devel
> (and clutter that mailinglist, which also causes harm).

My perception of our experience is that trying to get people to make
the right choice solely by writing things in documents is not
effective.

Epochs are frequently misunderstood and used where it would have been
better not to use them.  Proper usage of an epoch is sufficiently rare
that asking for a review is reasonable.  We do not have a central code
review board or anything; debian-devel is the closes thing we have.

The requirement to consult d-d has worked very well with Pre-Depends.
Many pointless and harmful Pre-Depends have been avoided this way,
with very low levels of project-wide effort.

> But requiring a consensus on -devel seems like wasting people's time to
> me.

I don't care whether it's consensus or consultation.  In practice
there are not going to be big arguments about this.

Ian.

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