bump epoch, don't roll back versions (Was Re: why I'm using Ubuntu instead of Fedora ATM)

[seth vidal]

On Wed, 2007-01-03 at 15:21 -0500, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Wednesday 03 January 2007 15:14, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > Sorry to sound non-constructive, but can we please stop breaking upgrade
> > paths just because someone happens to think that "epochs is ugly" (left
> > over packages is much less of a problem). I'd like to go even further
> > and ask for our build system to enforce this rule. The justification is
> > that it's only a number, and this practice is bordering introducing bugs
> > by refactoring source code just because it's "less ugly" that way.
> 
> I'll let conversation happen on the merrits of bumping or not bumping epoch.
> 
> However for buildsystem to enforce this, that's a pretty tough nut to solve, 
> since any build could get tagged for any variety of collections, regardless 
> of nvr.  In fact, the buildsystem (by design) only enforces unique n-v-r, so 
> you couldn't do 1:n-v-r and 2:n-v-r, the buildsystem would freak.  You'd have 
> to do 2:n-v-r+1 or some other unique 'n-v-r'.


You could, if you wanted to, starting from today have EVERY package have
an epoch. The epoch is incremented by the buildsystem/cvs.

So if I checkin a change and type 'make plague' it bumps the epoch so
that I know that EVERY new build I have would DEFINITELY > via EVR
comparisons than the one I built before.

We'd have to do some tricky stuff to make sure FC6EPOCH is ALWAYS less
than FC7EPOCH but that's do-able.


-sv