Michael Schwendt (mschwendt.tmp0701.nospam(a)arcor.de) said:
A technical reason for avoiding Epochs is that at the RPM level, the
software version of a package is not independent from the package
version. When adding an Epoch to a package, the Epoch becomes a necessary
part of all forms of RPM version comparison. This introduces weaknesses in
non-automatic versioned dependencies and requires packagers to specify the
exact %{epoch} in all such dependencies to keep them strict.
Example:
Name: bar
Requires: foo >= 1.0
would be satisfied by
Name: foo
Version: 0.5
Epoch: 1
because due to the Epoch, the smaller %version wins RPM version comparison.
However, these can be queried and accounted for when an epoch is
introduced. I'd agree with David - if we *can* make the upgrade path
clean, we should. Sometimes, there will be things that fail (horribly
broken %pre/%post scripts), but if the solution is clean (and adding
epoch where needed is clean), we should do it.
Bill