[aur-general] VCS PKGBUILD and Pacman 4.1: increase epoch?

[Rashif Ray Rahman]

On 6 April 2013 18:21, Cédric Girard <girard.cedric at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 11:49 PM, Jan Alexander Steffens wrote:
>> The problem is that makepkg will update the pkgver of the downloaded
>> PKGBUILD, so there is no reliable way of detecting an update without either
>> bumping the epoch, or storing another copy of the downloaded PKGBUILD.
>
> Updating the epoch each time seems a little too much. epoch does not
> seems to be designed for this.
>
> What I was speaking about is increasing the epoch when switching from
> one versioning scheme to another.
> I have taken the decision to do it.
> The reason is not about AUR helper. It is about consistency. Pacman is
> not aware from where your installed packages come from. It thus does
> not seem logical to generate new package version that are smaller than
> the old one and pretending they provide more recent version of the
> software.

You are correct. Use epoch only where and when necessary -- do not
abuse it. Its sole purpose is to ensure updated packages are treated
as 'upgrades' even when their version according to, say, vercmp, is
lower than the older package.

Epoch should then be introduced, but it need not be bumped unless the
versioning scheme changes once again. However, keep in mind that once
epoch is introduced, it must always remain (even if at 1).


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