Am 31.10.2017 um 12:21 schrieb Corinna Vinschen:
Not sure what distros you're referring to. Of the 58467 packages
in Fedora 26, 7822 are using epochs.
I'm expecting as much since it was rpm that introduced the epoch IIRC (I
think an earlier approach was using a "serial number"). Debian is still
using epochs in some places even though they've long provided facilities
in apt to make them obsolete. The distro I can positively say doesn't
use any epoch numbers is openSUSE:
https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Package_naming_guidelines
The idea of the epoch is to provide a total ordering among all possible
version numbers, which still doesn't work if the ordering gets changed
retroactivekly. But a total ordering is not necessary to do in practise
since you never keep all versions available in the install repo, so an
ordering among the available versions is all that matters.
--
Achim.
(on the road :-)
