On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 1:03 PM, Nagy Gabor
Nagy and I discussed a bit that topic. Don't we already read all local depends file for conflict and/or dep checking ? So this means we'll now read all local depends + all desc files ? Why not put epoch stuff in the local depends file then ?
IIRC there has been a plan for years to move replaces and force from depends to desc, probably for sync db? and for similar reasons, but no one ever dared to do it.
Another crazy thought, since epoch is really just a version extension, why not define it as a version prefix or something ? 3.5.0 < 2#3.4 < 3#2.0 or whatever crazy syntax we can come up with. Then we just need to have vercmp support that, and that's all, nothing complex to do in any database.
I prefer this tricky solution. Logically, epoch is an extension of the version number, so this doesn't even seem too hackish. And I would completely drop %FORCE% without backward compatibility to eliminate the need for reading db to get epoch. When %FORCE% doesn't work, pacman just won't upgrade some packages with -Su, and since our crucial packages (pacman, glibc etc.) has no force and versioned dependencies are used, this is not a big deal. Of course, in arch news this force->epoch change should be mentioned (to AUR packagers).
Alternative solution: db rewrite. ;-)
Not really a problem, but just wanted to mention something I just spotted in today -Su. xpdf had force flag, and was installed with pacman-epoch so local db entry had EPOCH=1 Now the versions were sane enough, so xpdf update dropped the force flag : http://repos.archlinux.org/wsvn/packages?op=comp&compare[]=/xpdf/trunk@58377&compare[]=/xpdf/trunk@96666 This works just fine with pacman 3.4 but not with pacman-epoch. :: Starting full system upgrade... warning: xpdf: local (3.02_pl4-2) is newer than extra (3.02_pl5-1)