Hi! On Tue, 2024-07-02 at 03:32:53 +0200, Guillem Jover wrote: > On Tue, 2024-07-02 at 00:54:13 +0100, Wookey wrote: > > 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), > > Oh, but they can cause actual harm. As has been mentioned on this > list many times, epochs by design invalidate existing versioned > relationships in both packaging fields (inside the distro (but in this > case that does not look like a problem) and on custom local packages), > and on tools/(maint)scripts comparing these versions. These can either > cause letting versions that should not be installed through, or can > cause version unsatisfiability. > > There's also the problem that epochs are (currently) not included as > part of the filenames. > > They are also a common source of errors, due to people forgetting they > need to add them in relationships (if you read package changelogs, > this is a common-ish occurrence).
Ah, another one that I had forgotten (which I had in mind adding explicitly to the FAQ), but I guess is a variant of the "them being confusing" point. Epochs make it way harder to understand the history of the archive. When you are not familiar with a package and its history it might be hard to tell what happened to it to require an epoch bump, where in many cases this is not even documented in the changelog (and it gets worse now with the trimmed changelogs), and you might need to dig into that history (via BTS, or git, or mailing list threads) to know for example whether a security issue affects old versions or not, whether that package used to be a different source package, whether it was due to an unnecessary epoch bump to revert a problematic version, whether it was for a proper version-space reset, etc. The fact that they are perceived as ugly, is a good thing, but it's not the main reason they should be avoided, to me that's just a materialization of their powerful and problematic nature. They indeed have their place, but I still have the feeling people reach for epochs too easily, because in general their addition _seems_ trivial (but not its irreversible consequences). Thanks, Guillem
