Re: ANNOUNCE: bittorrent downgrade

[Bill Nottingham <notting redhat com>]

Michael Schwendt (mschwendt tmp0701 nospam arcor de) said: 
> A technical reason for avoiding Epochs is that at the RPM level, the
> software version of a package is not independent from the package
> version. When adding an Epoch to a package, the Epoch becomes a necessary
> part of all forms of RPM version comparison. This introduces weaknesses in
> non-automatic versioned dependencies and requires packagers to specify the
> exact %{epoch} in all such dependencies to keep them strict.
> 
> Example:
> 
>   Name: bar
>   Requires: foo >= 1.0
> 
> would be satisfied by
> 
>   Name: foo
>   Version: 0.5
>   Epoch: 1
> 
> because due to the Epoch, the smaller %version wins RPM version comparison.

However, these can be queried and accounted for when an epoch is 
introduced. I'd agree with David - if we *can* make the upgrade path
clean, we should. Sometimes, there will be things that fail (horribly
broken %pre/%post scripts), but if the solution is clean (and adding
epoch where needed is clean), we should do it.

Bill