On Nov 8, 2011, at 2:07 AM, Sthu Deus wrote:
it seems to me to be weird having those "epoches"
If all software developers were "well behaved" and they all co- operated in their versioning, it would be weird to have "epochs". All versions, from all sources, would be monotonically increasing as a function of time.
But, as we know, software developers are an independent bunch of cowboys. Sometimes, for reasons that seem good and reasonable to the individual upstream developer involved, software version time seems to run backwards. "Epochs" are there so the rest of us (who aren't upstream developers) can pretend it didn't do that -- when the developers glitch their versions, we just move into a different epoch and go on about our lives.
Rick