On Aug 11, 2018, at 10:13, René J.V. Bertin wrote:
> I've been using non-integer (but numerical) epochs in a few of my ports just
> because it made sense to set it e.g. to 5.1 when I started using the 5.1
> branch in a port. AFAIK the property is purely internal so it could be
> anything (i.e. a string), much more so than the revision. In fact I thought
> MacPorts only uses it to divide the version timeline into individual epochs
> which don't have a chronological relationship among each other, no?
>
> I can imagine that it won't be easy to change the type used internally for
> the epoch so this is not a suggestion to change it (but if possible, yeah, I
> think it'd be a good idea to make it a string entity).
epoch and revision were always meant to be nonnegative integers. In the latest
version of MacPorts, this is now enforced.
> A question though: what epoch was being used for those ports of mine - just
> the `floor(epoch)` (or `(int)(epoch)`) value? If I'm going to have to correct
> my ports I'd just as well avoid the introduction of a new epoch ...
I have no idea.
