Bug 32747 - Hidden epoch are annoying
Summary: Hidden epoch are annoying
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Linux
Classification: Retired
Component: rpm
Version: 7.0
Hardware: i386
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Jeff Johnson
QA Contact: David Lawrence
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2001-03-22 22:51 UTC by Olivier Crête
Modified: 2007-04-18 16:32 UTC (History)
0 users

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Enhancement
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2001-03-22 23:22:15 UTC
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Olivier Crête 2001-03-22 22:51:43 UTC
I've been running into lots of problem due to epoch recently. As most
packagers do not use epoch. But you (RedHat) and Ximian have decided to
include epoch in your recent packages, lots of packages do not upgrade
properly. Like when I installed Nautilus and the associated packages,
up2date and red-carpet are trying to downgrade them. It would be extremely
nice to have a system-wide option to ignore epoch. Or at least epoch to be
displayed without doing the --queryformat thing. 

My other main question is, why is this thing still in there? Is there ANY
package that uses epoch for good reasons?

Another idea would be to ignore the epoch if one of the packages does not
have one instead of making it equal 0.

While I'm at it, packages that include an epoch where the developer did not
intend it to include the epoch are positively broken... (that includes lots
of RH7 packages)...

Comment 1 Jeff Johnson 2001-03-22 22:56:08 UTC
Yes, epoch's are annoying but absolutely necessary.

Comment 2 Olivier Crête 2001-03-22 23:15:13 UTC
Could they be at least displayed in rpm -qi ?
And I'm still searching for an example where they where useful...?

Comment 3 Olivier Crête 2001-03-22 23:22:10 UTC
From my understanding they are the same as serials?
If I want my package to be more recent that a redHat package... what should I
had to my spec file...

Serial: 1
Epoch: 1 

something else?

Comment 4 Jeff Johnson 2001-03-22 23:26:12 UTC
Yes, epoch's are the modern name for Serial:

An important example is in perl-5.6 which, since 6 < 503, is not "newer" than
perl-5.00503.

Displaying epoch's uniformly throughout all of rpm, like -qi, is gonna take a
while to accomplish.

Meanwhile, you can use a --queryformat like
    rpm -q --qf '%{epoch}:%{name}-%{version}-%{release}\n' <pkg>
to display epoch's.

You can even extend rpm's command line options by doing
    echo "rpm alias --myquery -q --qf
'%{epoch}:%{name}-%{version}-%{release}\n'" >> /etc/popt

(Note: pardon the line wrap, the above is all one line)

to be used as
    rpm --myquery <pkg+>
if you wish to see the epoch's by default.



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