On Thu, 24 Feb 2005, Ville [ISO-8859-1] Skytt� wrote:
Inter-repo wars are going to exist whether or not Fedora chooses to use epoch - they have no bearing on this decision.
Non-zero epochs are very inconvenient for 3rd party packagers in general, and especially those who need versioned dependencies and try to achieve cross-distro specfiles. It's not only "inter-repo"; think "upstream", non-FOSS vendors etc.
Yeah, those aren't necessarily the primary target group for FC/FE, but we have a simple, documented workaround that does not make our life harder, and certainly does make someone's easier, so why not apply it?
The workaround /does/ make things harder in general: packagers will have to learn it, and users will have to decipher it. Neither of those things are as trivial as they seem - the proposed scheme is obvious to us only because we already understand it.
Epochs may also cause nasty surprises even inside a single repository.
"may" == FUD :-) -- Elliot