[pacman-dev] Misleading info when epoch is used

Allan McRae allan at archlinux.org
Wed Dec 8 00:40:52 CET 2010


On 08/12/10 08:45, Sven-Hendrik Haase wrote:
> On 07.12.2010 23:51, Nagy Gabor 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...
>>
>> NG
>>
>>
> I'm the packager of supertuxkart and I don't see what exactly went
> wrong. I'm not using any funny options in the PKGBUILD. I realize that I
> can fix your issue with options=(force) but is this an issue for
> everyone or just you due to something you did?
>

This is not your fault.   We are working on a better system than 
options=('force') to a new system using "epoch" values.   This is caused 
by Nagy installing a package he built using the epoch method and then 
attempting to update to a package without it.

Allan


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