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

[Brian Inglis]

On 2017-10-31 12:15, Achim Gratz wrote:
> 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

OpenSUSE mandates package version rules and provides special characters to
mitigate any problems with upstream package version numbering, making the
OpenSUSE package version independent of the upstream version unless it conforms:

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

> 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.

Another approach would be to add a packaging server release timestamp e.g.
strftime %s metadata which provides ordering independent of versions.

-- 
Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada