Improve the way rpm decides what is newer

[Michael Schwendt]

On Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:43:58 -0600 (CST), Mike wrote:

> Epochs are nasty.  Can anyone think of any other mechanism they could use
> with rpm?  I'm not talking about what rpm can do today, but any other
> mechanism we could make rpm do tomorrow that could replace epoch?

Given that Epoch can make an update go from a higher %{version} to a lower
one (which even may be a completely normal scenario for upstream project
splits), you can't avoid making Epoch the most-significant portion of RPM
version comparison. One can only work around versioning scheme flaws until
one runs into an unexpected problem where an Epoch is needed. Introduce
an Epoch, and it must be considered in any other explicit references
(Obsoletes'n'friends).

There's also the problem of Epoch visibility. It is not part of the
package file name (even if Yum and other tools don't hide the Epoch value
when printing package ids). Making it part of the file name, makes them
less clear/readible.