Bug#248618: Section 3.2.1 encourages use of epochs
On Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 12:39:25AM +0200, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote:
> On Wed, May 12, 2004 at 03:54:46PM +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> > On Wed, May 12, 2004 at 03:39:59PM +0200, Jeroen van Wolffelaar wrote:
> > > What if you upload a new upstream, but it is too broken yet, and you
> > > want to downgrade in Debian? You need an epoch. Or if you simply make a
> > > mistake? Or a NMU uploads a new upstream version, or a broken version,
> > > by mistake? It happens.
> >
> > I would make it "newversion+oldversion". Similar things are done for alpha
> > or prealpha packages, e.g. "1.2+1.3pre3".
> >
> > > One only should take care to not choose a version system that will
> > > require an epoch increase every time.
> >
> > Well, if we can avoid it without any payload, why not do it?
>
> The payload is obfuscated, hacked version numbers, newversion+oldversion
> is very confusing, especially if the package isn't at all in
> 'newversion'. You sure must admit that 'newversion+oldversion' is a hack
> around the version compare function...
>
> Epoch is the solution for that.
Epoch suffers from the nasty bug of not being written in the package
name. For example the file name of the .deb for gcc 4:3.3.3-3 is
gcc_3.3.3-3_i386.deb
This can be very confusing, especially when used for downgrading the
upstrream version. At worse you will end up with two packages with the
same name, which is not allowed.
So using newversion+oldversion is more reliable and cause less trouble.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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