Disttag for Fedora 7 and beyond

[Axel Thimm]

On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 05:44:27AM -0600, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-01-05 at 10:25 +0100, Axel Thimm wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 05, 2007 at 09:55:50AM +0100, Michael Schwendt wrote:
> > > Start using stricter versioning with Epoch bumps as necessary,
> > 
> > Ouch! Anything but epochs!
> 
> Why?  I keep hearing epochs are the spawn of satan.  It's just a
> number... why are they so bad?

If it were just for a per package versioning epochs are just ugly, but
when it comes to sane versioning of package dependencies you get these
artificial beasts scattered all around.

How many packagers have been bitten by Requires: foo >= 2.0.1 while
they really needed foo >= 17:2.0.1 and the next update needed at least
23:3.0. E.g. the epoch inflation everywhere make it mandatory to start
checking all your versioned BRs and Requires for having epochs before
writing them down and it's both cumbersome and error-prone. Not to
mention that it's non-portable, too, but that's not an issue here.

And this is just the base problem - the ugliest part is that once you
accidentially increase the epoch you're trapped - there's no way back
- you have to cope with the above issue for the rest of this package's
life (or until rpm-ng 6 changes rpmvercmp to use somthing else than
epochs). The monotonic increase is similar to entropy in a way, so
we'll all eventually die in a warm equilibrium. ;)

Anyway I hope this short intro into "Epochs: are all equal to 666?"
gives you some idea, otherwise "evil epoch rpm" gives 43.000 hits :)
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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