Re: Epoch usage conventions (was Re: R 3.0.0 and required rebuilds of all reverse Depends: of R)

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Fri, 2013-04-05 at 13:09:51 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Guillem Jover writes ("Epoch usage conventions (was Re: R 3.0.0 and required rebuilds of all reverse Depends: of R)"):
> > Well, I strongly disagree that in general using epochs for packaging
> > mistakes is a good practice (and I've thought so even before Ubuntu
> > existed). The main purpose of epochs is to be able to handle mistakes
> > or changes in the version numbering itself. Say upstream resets their
> > versioning from v450 to 0.0.0, or from date based 20130404 to 0.0.0
> > (although the packager could have avoided that by prefixing with "0."),
> > or if they used something like 1.210 and they meant 1.2.10 (svgalib),
> > or a package takes over another's name (git).
> 
> I agree entirely with what Guillem says.
> 
> > Also, introducing an epoch where there was none in an NMU should be
> > frowned upon, unfortunately I've seen multiple instances of these in
> > the recent past, something I'd be very upset if it happened to any of
> > the packages I maintain.
> 
> I wonder if this should be explicitly stated in the dev ref.

Yeah, I guess, I'll try to come up with a patch in the next weeks
(added to my TODO list).

Thanks.
Guillem