Adding an epoch to the 'steam' package

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort]

On 16/08/2021 16:08, Simon McVittie wrote:
> Before Valve's Steam game distribution platform became available on
> Linux, the Debian source package name 'steam' was used by an unrelated
> package sTeam, an "environment for cooperative knowledge managment"
> (a wiki and related software). sTeam was removed from Debian in 2010,
> and from Ubuntu in 2013. Valve's Steam was subsequently packaged for
> Debian, also in 2013, reusing the 'steam' name.
> 
> sTeam had version numbers higher than Valve's Steam, and Launchpad is
> stricter about monotonically increasing version numbers than dak is, so
> Ubuntu added a 1: epoch to their 'steam' package when Valve's Steam
> was introduced into Ubuntu.
> 
> This meant that the Ubuntu package superseded the native package
> distributed by Valve, even if it was a lower version than Valve's, which
> was needlessly confusing. As a result, Valve's native package now has the
> same epoch as the Ubuntu package.
> 
> I would like to add the same 1: epoch to the steam package in Debian
> and all of its binary packages, so that all of our version numbers
> (Valve's, Debian's and Ubuntu's) are directly comparable again. This
> would allow Ubuntu to sync the steam package from Debian unmodified,
> if there are no functional changes that they need to make (at the moment
> there are, but I intend to work on reducing or eliminating those during
> the bookworm cycle).
> 
> As a side benefit from this, snapshot.debian.org would work properly again
> (at the moment, it lists the historical sTeam as newer than Valve's Steam).

Sounds reasonable.

Cheers,
Emilio