On 2024-07-01 23:59 +0200, Alec Leamas wrote: > But this is not about third parties, it's about upstream which publishes PPA > packages. So far these are by far the most used Linux packages. > > I also hesitate to add an epoch, after all they are basically considered > evil. But if we should not use them when upstream has a broken versioning we > are about to replace, when should we use it?
Quite. People are quite resistant to spoiling neat version numbers with epochs, and no-one likes them, but they don't do any actual harm (except sometimes break scripts and tools that forgot to allow for them), and this seems seems like a very sensible use case: essentially jus thwat they are intended for.. Yes it was upstream that messed up not us/you, but we have the technology and you can make user's lives easier by just adding an epoch. It's a pity upsream didn't know about the 0~ trick so that it wouldn't matter what crazy version string was used, but it's done now. I guess the only potential argument against it (beyond 'we don't like epochs') is 'how big is the userbase now and later'. i.e if this is actually fairly new and there aren't really that many users with the duff versions, but maybe in the future there will be 100 times more getting their packages from us, ubuntu and upstream PPA, then that's a reasonable argument to make them have to deal with it manually in exchange for 'neat' epochless versions forevermore for all those future users when everyone has forgotten about this cock-up. Ultimately you are the maintainer so it's up to you. From what you have said, I think I'd epoch in this case, unless I thought the current set of users could be considered 'de minimus' from the point of view of say 5 years time. Wookey -- Principal hats: Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
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