[pacman-dev] Misleading info when epoch is used

[Dan McGee]

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 4:51 PM, Nagy Gabor <ngaba at bibl.u-szeged.hu> wrote:
> $ 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...

Shoot, and then I forgot to respond to this.

Yes, Allan/Xavier pointed out some deficiencies in the epoch code as
it stands now in pacman-git, and these will get addressed, I just
haven't had the time to make sure things are going to work as expected
and run though all possible cases in my head. What actually happened
is %FORCE% --> %EPOCH% 1 when the package was installed.

-Dan