[Pkg-mailman-hackers] Bug#366438: epoch of 0 causes apt to want to install mailman over and over

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 03:01:10PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote:

> Every time anyone runing mailman in unstable upgraes with apt, it
> "upgrades" mailman again and again, because it is confused by your
> use of the 0: epoch in the package version number.

That use of "0:" was an oversight; I had planned on removing it before
upload, but forgot.

>> I'm not sure if this is a problem with mailman or dpkg, but apt
>> continually wants to upgrade mailman, even though I'm at the most
>> recent version:

> I can reproduce the same problem here.

It is reproducible on just about any Debian machine out there, the
only condition being a recent "enough" Mailman installed.

> I've filed a bug on apt for being confused about the 0: epoch and
> not realizing that the installed and available versions are the
> same.

So did I (more exactly, I reassigned the bugs filed against mailman);
I've also submitted a patch that solves it that just got applied to
the bzr tree. Please merge your apt bug with mine.

> However, I don't think we should wait on a fix to that bug to fix
> mailman.

I agree; however katie uses (via python-apt) libapt-pkg to compare
versions of uploads and version already in sid, and thus suffers from
the same problem and rejects my uploads without an explicit epoch. I
thus have to wait until a fixed version of apt is fixed _and_
ftp-master has the fixed libapt-pkg installed.

> There's no reason for mailman to be using an epoch at all,

Yes, there is no good reason.

> the previous version, "2.1.7+2.1.8rc1-1" correctly compares less
> than the current version, "2.1.8-1".

There never was a "2.1.7+2.1.8rc1-1" version in Debian. The previous
version is 0:2.1.7-2.1.8rc1-1, and the version before that 2.1.7-n for
some value of n. All this doesn't make the explicit zero epoch any
less unnecessary.

> All the epoch is doing is confusing apt.

Its original purpose was to allow me to use ":" in the
<upstream_version>, but ftpmasters won't let me upload a package
bearing such a version. I thus removed the ":" in the
<upstream_version>, but forgot to remove the explicit zero epoch.

> Please either remove it

I'd like nothing more than it, but katie won't let me.

-- 
Lionel