On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 09:24:04PM +0100, Vincent Bernat wrote:
❦ 14 février 2018 15:15 -0500, Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> :In the example above, while in Wheezy, the dependency was perfectly correct. It became wrong because of the epoch bump (for no obvious reason). For software we distribute ourselves, this change can be caught at some point before the release (or by automation, like you suggest), but for people packaging stuff outside Debian, this can be far more painful.It isn't clear how getting rid of epochs would prevent crazy versioning. You'd have just as much trouble with 1.8-really1.7-again1.8-fooledyou1.7But they don't stay forever. They may never appear in a release.
That doesn't matter. The fundamental problem was that it's impossible to predict that a future package would have an older version of the software with a newer name. Whether that's done with an epoch that (horrors!) won't go away or because someone creates a crazy version string that obfuscates what's being done (yay?), the unpredictable breakage is the same. The solution isn't to get rid of epochs, the solution is to not create packages which contain older versions of
software with newer names. Mike Stone