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)...
Yes, epoch's are annoying but absolutely necessary.
Could they be at least displayed in rpm -qi ? And I'm still searching for an example where they where useful...?
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?
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.