Epoch 0 (was: rpms/lft/devel lft.spec,1.6,1.7)

[Michael Schwendt]

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 13:17:44 +0100 (CET), Dag Wieers wrote:

> > > > Frankly I could not give a damn about the fact that we break Freshen - these
> > > > things are fed through yum from a yum repository, so I really
> > > > don't care that rpm -F might fail in some weird conditions.
> > > > 
> > > > Epoch: 0 is stupid, useless and moronic.
> > > 
> > > Where were you 2 years ago ? We needed you back then :)
> > 
> > Two years ago, explicit Epoch 0 made sense.
> > 
> > Nowadays, the supported versions of RPM no longer require it.
> 
> Explicit Epoch 0 never made sense, we never required it for anything, Red 
> Hat never required it and JBJ admits he was misquoted on the subject.
> 
> But please do include your line of thought.

My line of thought is the following:

I was not involved in making explicit Epoch 0 a policy. I understood the
problems with missing Epoch and RPM < 4.1.1. I didn't see the explicit
Epoch 0 rule as a burden. A burden so high that I would complain forever
and rather choose to boycott a community project than get productive.

There was at least one case (modplug is the one I remember) where the
explicit Epoch 0 rule avoided upgrade problems. Since I knew we would be
save, I didn't track any other corner-cases, which would be affected by
the Epoch problem. The good effect of the explicit Epoch 0 rule was, we
didn't need to care about related upgrade problems.

I don't remember that jbj was ever quoted on it. I didn't pursue some
of the controversial subjects as much as a few individuals did.
I only remember that jbj's comment on "%buildroot vs $RPM_BUILD_ROOT" was
misinterpreted.

And as a final comment on the subject, personal opinion is not what
counts.  Decisions are needed. You can evaluate personal opinions and
consider them in a decision. However, it's the final decision that
counts. How to arrive at a decision is another subject. And I hope the
Fedora Extras Steering Committee can bring about a decision in this
matter, too.