[Fedora-packaging] PackageNamingGuidelines comments

[Elliot Lee]

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005, Ville [ISO-8859-1] Skyttä wrote:

> > Inter-repo wars are going to exist whether or not Fedora chooses to use
> > epoch - they have no bearing on this decision.
> 
> Non-zero epochs are very inconvenient for 3rd party packagers in
> general, and especially those who need versioned dependencies and try to
> achieve cross-distro specfiles.  It's not only "inter-repo"; think
> "upstream", non-FOSS vendors etc.
>
> Yeah, those aren't necessarily the primary target group for FC/FE, but
> we have a simple, documented workaround that does not make our life
> harder, and certainly does make someone's easier, so why not apply it?

The workaround /does/ make things harder in general: packagers will have
to learn it, and users will have to decipher it. Neither of those things
are as trivial as they seem - the proposed scheme is obvious to us only
because we already understand it.

> Epochs may also cause nasty surprises even inside a single repository.

"may" == FUD :-)
-- Elliot