[pacman-dev] epoch (was: Chat with toofishes at jabber.org)

[Nagy Gabor]

> Nagy and I discussed a bit that topic.
> Don't we already read all local depends file for conflict and/or dep
> checking ?
> So this means we'll now read all local depends + all desc files ?
> Why not put epoch stuff in the local depends file then ?
> 
> IIRC there has been a plan for years to move replaces and force from
> depends to desc, probably for sync db? and for similar reasons, but
> no one ever dared to do it.
> 
> Another crazy thought, since epoch is really just a version
> extension, why not define it as a version prefix or something ?
> 3.5.0 < 2#3.4 < 3#2.0
> or whatever crazy syntax we can come up with. Then we just need to
> have vercmp support that, and that's all, nothing complex to do in
> any database.

I prefer this tricky solution. Logically, epoch is an extension of the
version number, so this doesn't even seem too hackish. And I would
completely drop %FORCE% without backward compatibility to eliminate the
need for reading db to get epoch. When %FORCE% doesn't work, pacman
just won't upgrade some packages with -Su, and since our crucial
packages (pacman, glibc etc.) has no force and versioned dependencies
are used, this is not a big deal. Of course, in arch news this
force->epoch change should be mentioned (to AUR packagers).

Alternative solution: db rewrite. ;-)
 
> I am sorry this comes up a bit late, but only git code has been
> touched and no harm has been made as far as I know, I just want to be
> sure that we carefully considered all possible solutions for the
> stupid versioning some projects use, and that we indeed chose the
> best way (epoch is probably alright and better than force), but also
> the best implementation.