> Do you have a good suggestion for what to sbstitute for the : ? > It must be something that can never be a different valid version number in > Debian and works with make and at other places without special quoting.
Perhaps "colon": [...]/package/gawk/version/1colon3.0.6-1 Packages using epochs will always use them, so it is impossible that a different version of the same package, when replacing ":" by "colon", yields the same result. For the purposes of the autobuilder, I think this would be enough.