'outdated' packages in rawhide

[Hugo van der Kooij]

On Sat, 13 Mar 2004, Arkadiusz Miskiewicz wrote:

> Dnia Saturday 13 of March 2004 17:40, Mike A. Harris napisa?:
> > >Or perhaps because you don't use Epoch while you should.
> >
> > Epoch causes it's own problems, and should be avoided at all
> > costs.  Yes, it does fix these types of situations, but at the
> > cost of creating permanent Epoch issues.
> Could you elaborate? I have Epoch in over 700 spec files without any
> (non-human) problems.

Imagine you make package foo with epoch 10 and version 1.3.1 which has a
seperate devel package.

This works great just fine for you I guess.

But if I dedice to package bar and it requires bar 1.3.1 I would use:

Requires: foo = 1.3.1

But any user will notice a dependency error like:

bar-1.2.4 requires foo-1.3.1

A normal user will shout out some insults to his/her system about this
stupid error.

I would need to dig up this epoch number and make a package with:

Requires: foo = 10:1.3.1

But how is a normal user to know how to handle these errors?

So in my view the Epoch field is a pain to great to inflict normal usees
with. It breaks dependencies in a way a normal user simply can't
comprehend because the user will not see the Epoch information anywhere.

Hugo.

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