On 2017-10-31 12:15, Achim Gratz wrote: > Am 31.10.2017 um 12:21 schrieb Corinna Vinschen: >> Not sure what distros you're referring to. Of the 58467 packages >> in Fedora 26, 7822 are using epochs. > > I'm expecting as much since it was rpm that introduced the epoch IIRC (I think > an earlier approach was using a "serial number"). Debian is still using > epochs > in some places even though they've long provided facilities in apt to make > them > obsolete. The distro I can positively say doesn't use any epoch numbers is > openSUSE: > > https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Package_naming_guidelines
OpenSUSE mandates package version rules and provides special characters to mitigate any problems with upstream package version numbering, making the OpenSUSE package version independent of the upstream version unless it conforms: https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Package_naming_guidelines#Handling_special_version_strings > The idea of the epoch is to provide a total ordering among all possible > version > numbers, which still doesn't work if the ordering gets changed > retroactivekly. > But a total ordering is not necessary to do in practise since you never keep > all > versions available in the install repo, so an ordering among the available > versions is all that matters. Another approach would be to add a packaging server release timestamp e.g. strftime %s metadata which provides ordering independent of versions. -- Take care. Thanks, Brian Inglis, Calgary, Alberta, Canada
