[pacman-dev] epoch

[Xavier Chantry]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 11:26 PM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
>
> That is because none of the packages know about epoch yet.   You are going
> to have to manually update packages that use the force flag for the time
> being.
>
> BTW, the db update in [testing] has epoch=1 as the db-4.9 package had a
> force value, so you should be able to update that.
>

Since force is simply interpreted as epoch=1, sane version bumps of
force packages should work (as was the case with xpdf). But now that
you point it out, insane version changes would not work indeed, that's
the ones which would require an epoch bump.

Anyway I was just pointing out that when a package has epoch=1, it can
not be dropped. Which implies that force cannot be dropped, but only
kept or replaced by epoch=1 or higher.