Epoch Support for Version Numbers

[bos]

(Imported from Trac #135, reported by @nominolo on 2007-05-28)

Some packages use Date-based version numbers. This makes it hard to later change that package to the major.minor.patchlevel format. Debian uses [Epochs] , an optional prefix number (defaulting to zero). I.e.:

version-number ::= [ epoch ':' ] num { '.' num } [ label ]

If omitted, the epoch defaults to 0. Thus:

2007.04.02 < 1:0.0.1

[bos]

(Imported comment by @dcoutts on 2007-05-28)

The downside with this is that every dependency on the new foo-1.0 has to specify foo >= 1:1.0. And they have to do this for ever more. There is no way to drop the epoch. It's not clear we want or need this.

[tibbe]

Closing as there's been no activity in years.

We're cleaning up the bug tracker to make it useful again and are thus closing bugs that haven't seen any activity in a long time. Please re-open (or file a new bug) if the problem reappears.