Alec, On Monday, July 1, 2024 4:25:59 PM MST Alec Leamas wrote: > On 02/07/2024 01:19, Alec Leamas wrote: > > Let's drop this subthread, keeping eyes on the ball: what is a sane > > version? > > Looking at this from another point of view: is there any situation where > an epoch is appropriate? > > --alec Epocs are usually used when upstream changes their versioning system in a way that causes problem for our packaging. For example, if they previous have used dates for their release versions and switch to ordinals, Debian needs a way of indicating that version 1.0 is newer than 2024.01.05. This is to support upgrades of official Debian packages in Debian repositories from one version to the next. Epocs are not typically used to fix problems in .debs published in some PPA that was never an official part of Debian. This case is a little odd because the unofficial .debs were published in the PPA by upstream themselves (without thinking through how the .debs should be versioned). As a general observation, upstream developers don’t tend to have a good grasp of how to create an idomatic .deb. If they did, they would just release it to Debian themselves (I say that with my upstream hat on). However, as I said in the other email, adding an epoch to a package isn’t the worst thing that has ever happened, and if there are a large number of users who have these PPA packages installed, then it might be in the best interests of the *users* to do so. In my mind, the users always come first when making these types of decisions. -- Soren Stoutner soren@debian.org
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