Re: epoch fix?

[David Kalnischkies <kalnischkies@gmail.com>]

On Thu, May 9, 2013 at 11:43 AM, Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> wrote:
> I presume it's OK to add the implicit 0: to non-epoch depends?

No, that not okay. dpkg rewrites versions at times – mainly in
/var/lib/dpkg/status – to a "canonical" form, so this information is
lost at some point.

Especially does it cause "strange" behavior in APT: The records in
the Packages file (aka with 0:) will be different from the records in the
status file (aka without 0:) so APT will think the records talk about two
different versions of the package (as the dependencies are different).

Example:

Package: foo
Filename: foo.deb
Depends: bar (>= 0:0.00-0)

Package: foo
Status: install ok installed
Depends: bar (>= 0.0)

(And before someone asks: wontfix in APT for performance and code
 duplication with dpkg reasons, among others)

In my eyes it would actually make sense to rewrite the version in a
"canonical" form already at package creation time and warn in lintian
if a version wasn't written in the "canonical" form (as this usually indicates
a misunderstanding/bug already). Only problem I see with that is that dpkg
isn't providing an interface for it so far which lintian could use.


Best regards

David Kalnischkies