Re: epoch fix?

[Peter Samuelson <peter@p12n.org>]

[Matt Zagrabelny]
> I've grepped the d-d list, but didn't find any threads regarding
> fixing epochs in package versions.

This does come up occasionally.

> If so, could we add a field to debian/control such as
> "Supersede-Epoch". If set to 'yes', then dpkg considers this package
> to have an epoch of infinity for version comparisons.

My preferred variant is to treat epoch 99 as greater than any other
2-digit number, but less than 0.  ("0:" is implied if you don't specify
an epoch.)

But either way, the problem is that .dsc and .deb version numbers are
not used only by dpkg.  Lots of tools use them, inside and outside of
Debian packages, inside and outside of Debian infrastructure.  We
cannot be sure that they all use dpkg's own interfaces to do so (e.g.
dpkg --compare-versions, perl -MDpkg::Version).