Re: 2008Q1 -> current: downgrade

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

On Tue, 06 May 2008, Alistair Crooks wrote:
> But what's confusing me is that this epoch has a higher precedence,
> and yet it's tagged onto the end of the version number. Straight away,
> that has ordering implications, is counter-intuitive, and is unlikely
> to fly long term.
  [...]
> i.e. 0.14.2,1 above needs to become 1<sep>0.14.2. A missing epoch
> number and separator means the epoch defaults to 0 for the epoch.

I don't care about the exact syntax, only about the overall semantics.
The syntax I suggested is what FreeBSD does, but I agree that it's
counter-intuitive.

Aleksey Cheusov posted something from Debian, in which they would use
"1:0.14.2".  I'd be happy with that too.

> So I need to ask - how common is this? I can think of a few occasions
> in the last 10 years where this has happened, but not many. Why would
> a version numbering scheme reset itself without the PKGBASE changing?

I think the most common reason would be a new project moving from using
date stamps for pre-releases to using numbered versions for releases.
We could always address that in future by using "0.0.yyyymmdd" instead
of "yyyymmdd" as the pkgsrc version number.

I also seem to recall packages moving from something like 3.004005
to something like 3.4.5.

--apb (Alan Barrett)