[Rpm-maint] [rpm-software-management/rpm] version comparison with epoch does not work as expected (#450)

[Michal Novotný]

Hey Jeff,

So there are two things, right? First, you can say that when Epoch tag is not used, then Epoch tag's value is zero for a package.

If rpm needs to compare two packages, which one is newer, then it can do full-fleged comparison with epochs included.

If however comparing a package version (that always contains an epoch number) against a custom version expresion, which does not include an epoch number in it, it can just skip comparing the epochs.

So, yes, missing Epoch tag implicates Epoch = 0 for a package.

But missing epoch in a version expression means: "do not compare epochs".

Does it make sense to you?

The thing is that i would like to get spec files to be used directly by upstream and if they really needed to care about an epoch being set somewhere e.g. in Fedora, that just makes the whole thing...well, not possible.  It's like this epoch algo really separates the whole rpm ecosystem into individual clusters. Could we, please, consider it again whether the behavior really can't be tweaked?



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