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Description of problem: RHEL5's perl-Archive-Tar had an epoch of 1 RHEL6's perl-Archive-Tar has no epoch Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Installed Packages perl-Archive-Tar.noarch 1:1.39.1-1.el5_5.2 installed Available Packages perl-Archive-Tar.i686 1.58-115.el6 base I apologize if this by design, or policy, that epochs in 5 are removed in 6, or is this a bug?
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in the current release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Because the affected component is not scheduled to be updated in the current release, Red Hat is unfortunately unable to address this request at this time. Red Hat invites you to ask your support representative to propose this request, if appropriate and relevant, in the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If you would like it considered as an exception in the current release, please ask your support representative.
Thank you for the report. Upgrade from RHEL-5 to RHEL-6 is not supported. On the other hand this issue could be fixed. Please note RHEL-6 perl-Archive-Tar binary package is output of perl source package (in contrast to RHEL-5), so fixing this issue would require to rebuild perl.
Your welcome, I just figured that if an epoch was introduced in RHEL-5 to be above 3rd party packagers, that in RHEL-6 the same epoch should still be kept to stay at least on the same level as any 3rd party packagers. Someone accidentally 'upgrading' to version 1:1.52 or something like that might be a concern.
I pondered this issue again and I changed my conclusion. Epoch number is ugly hack and it's source of never-ending mistakes (like this one, when new distributions are composed from related projects sharing packages). Because upgrade between RHEL major versions is not supported, third-parties should provide separate repositories for different RHEL major versions. Thus I do not want to get the epoch number back.