Dear Debian XMPP Maintainers, TL;DR: I'd like to help out updating purple-rocketchat and would appreciate your feedback on NMUing purple-rocketchat and introducing an epoch.
While preparing what might become the base of a merge-request [1] for a new version of purple-rocketchat, I came across a problem with the versioning: 1. Previously, upstream used mercurial (bitbucket.org) for SCM w/o release tags. Thus, we had the '~hg%Y%m%d.%(hash)' part in previous Debian versions. A few years ago, upstream moved to git [2], so we should change '~hg' to '~git', but orthographically '~git' is considered to be older than '~hg'. 2. Even though there was no single release tag 0.1, we have used '0.1' as base upstream version number. Using a debian/watch file with uscan's git-HEAD scheme (e.g. as in [3]), results in auto-generated base version number '0.0', thus, these are always considered to be older than the previous '0.1' versions. So, with updating to the new upstream repo and using uscan watch file, we get this version change: from 0.1~hg20200403.800ef89-1 (as currently in stable,testing,unstable) to 0.0~git20220925.a8a887c-X (cp. [1]) AFAIK, this requires the introduction of an epoch, after consulting debian-devel. Do you agree, or do you have other opinions? Is it ok, if I try to update purple-rocketchat via NMU (sponsoring needed)? Kind regards, Nicolas [1]: https://salsa.debian.org/nsc/purple-rocketchat [2]: https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-rocketchat [3]: https://salsa.debian.org/nsc/purple-rocketchat/-/blob/debian/latest/debian/watch