[[PATCH setup] 0/3] Prepare for colons in version numbers

[Achim Gratz]

Am 31.10.2017 um 12:21 schrieb Corinna Vinschen:
> Not sure what distros you're referring to.  Of the 58467 packages
> in Fedora 26, 7822 are using epochs.

I'm expecting as much since it was rpm that introduced the epoch IIRC (I 
think an earlier approach was using a "serial number").  Debian is still 
using epochs in some places even though they've long provided facilities 
in apt to make them obsolete.  The distro I can positively say doesn't 
use any epoch numbers is openSUSE:

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Package_naming_guidelines

The idea of the epoch is to provide a total ordering among all possible 
version numbers, which still doesn't work if the ordering gets changed 
retroactivekly.  But a total ordering is not necessary to do in practise 
since you never keep all versions available in the install repo, so an 
ordering among the available versions is all that matters.


-- 
Achim.

(on the road :-)