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

[Brian Inglis]

On 2017-10-31 05:21, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Oct 31 11:06, Achim Gratz wrote:
>> Am 30.10.2017 um 16:58 schrieb Jon Turney:
>>> "everyone" != "everyone, ignoring people who disagree with me"
>>
>> I think this is an unfair summary of my position.
>>
>>> If you think epochs are a bad idea, you need to give reasons, not just
>>> pretend there is no debate.
>>
>> I was strictly talking about those folks who've had the opportunity in
>> practise so far, which is all the major GNU/Linux distributions.  The ones
>> I'm aware of aren't using epochs and instead decided to use other means of
>> achieving the same (or similar) goals.  In fact they created rules to not
>> use epochs even though the tools support them.  Their line of reasoning
>> always was (and still is), that once you start using epochs there is no way
>> going back and you could just as well have used monotonic release numbers
>> instead of versions.  The other point is that it is close to impossible that
>> everybody will agree on what the epoch ought to be.  The last point is that
>> once an epoch bump is introduced, you can't decide to sort things
>> differently unless you're prepared to invalidate all existing released
>> packages.
> 
> Not sure what distros you're referring to.  Of the 58467 packages
> in Fedora 26, 7822 are using epochs.

At ~13% that's a bit higher than Ubuntu/Debian Trusty with 5056/48423 ~10%.
It does not appear that either of those bases use the epoch in the package
archive names, only in the package manager.
That may be the way to go - don't use the epoch field in the package archive name.
If the epochs differ - the package versions are totally different in some way.
If they are the same epoch, the packages are correctly ordered by a version
sort, as supported in sort, ls, etc.

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