[pacman-dev] Misleading info when epoch is used

[Nagy Gabor]

$ 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