[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Add information on version comparison to manpages

[Xavier]

On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 1:09 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> But what is the expected behavior for a2ps with the 'c' in there? Does
> 4.13 come before 4.13b? You are saying "I don't like this" without a
> whole lot of justification and you even gave me a converse example as
> far as I can tell. And I would tend to trust the upstream RPM guys
> quite a bit when it comes to version number ordering, as they deal
> with this a lot.
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=50977
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=178798
>

I was just discussing this problem with Dan and how rpm deals with it,
then he mentioned to me the Epoch term. I found a description here :
http://sial.org/howto/rpm/epoch/

Come to think about it, this seems much much smarter and better than
the FORCE flag, while staying simple enough.
This would obsolete this annoying question which had no clear answer :
when can we remove the force flag.
And it would provide a better workaround for these version problems.