epoch bump request for gnome-calculator

[Jeremy Bicha <jbicha@debian.org>]

Emailing both debian-devel and the Debian GNOME mailing list.

I am requesting project approval for me to upload gnome-calculator
with an epoch.

Five years ago, gcalctool 6.4 was renamed to gnome-calculator and
renumbered to 3.8. This seemed like a clear case for an epoch since
this was a permanent change in the version numbering scheme.

I made this change in the Debian VCS and uploaded it to Ubuntu. At the
time I did not have upload rights to Debian and Ubuntu has deadlines.

A month later, a Debian GNOME team member recognized that we could use
a dh_gencontrol hack [1] to only add the epoch to the gcalctool
transitional package and we didn't need an epoch for gnome-calculator.
Similarly, we could have used this hack for many of the gnome-games
packages when they were split into separate source packages but we
didn't because we uploaded them before we made this change. (The
version numbering didn't change but gnome-games had an epoch we didn't
need to carry to the new packages.)

More recently, I have worked to reduce the difference between Debian
and Ubuntu packaging for many GNOME packages. It gets very tedious to
need to upload gnome-calculator in Debian and then do a separate
upload in Ubuntu (along with all the required Vcs merging, updating
and tagging) just to add the epoch in Ubuntu. It would be a lot nicer
if I could just sync the Debian package to Ubuntu.

So is it appropriate to bump an epoch in Debian to match an important
downstream's epoch?

[1] Current example of the hack:
https://salsa.debian.org/fonts-team/fonts-ubuntu/blob/debian/unstable/debian/rules

Thanks,
Jeremy Bicha