$ sudo pacman -Su warning: supertuxkart: local (0.6.2a-2) is newer than community (0.7rc1-1) What? First I thought that our vercmp code is buggy, but vercmp binary worked as expected. Then I figured out that my local package has epoch=1, but the epoch is unset on the community package (so this seems to be a packager bug). So the above message is simply misleading (probably this is not the only one). It would be better to switch to a default version printing: "0.6.2a-2 [epoch=1]", or "1#0.6.2a-2" etc. In fact I don't like neither force nor epoch. Epoch is just a version prefix, why don't we let the packager to workaround this (KISS)? We can introduce a new separator (now we have one: '.'), for example '#', and let the packager define his favourite pkgversion (maybe epoch in mind), like "1#0.6.2a-2". Epoch just complicates code and leads to "wtf" imho... NG