Bug#574956: dpkg drops zero-epoch in status file

[Raphael Hertzog]

On Fri, 30 Apr 2010, Guillem Jover wrote:
> > It is relatively easy for apt to ignore the epoch for the hash as it is
> > a simple hash and we don't need to care about false positive removes
> > so apt still doesn't need to do expensive parsing here, but i want
> > to ask dpkg maintainers (cc'ed and titled to grep their attension)
> > for their opinion as this is maybe something they want to change
> > instead in their logic for consistence…
> > (through no zero epoch could be a change to be consistence…).
> 
> I don't think dpkg should stop removing the zero-epoch, it would be
> redundant and confusing information. But it might be a good idea to
> make dpkg-gencontrol for example drop it on output. And it seems that
> apt might need to consider the other equivalent versions too.

I don't agree with this. The perl API preserve all the information
required to be able to output exactly the same string that has been parsed
and I don't see why the C part should not be able to do the same.

Please find attached a patch that implements this. I added non-regression
tests and verified that the epoch is preserved with the package that
generated this request. I'd like to commit this to the master branch so a
review is welcome.

That said maybe dpkg-gencontrol should indeed simplify the output but
that's a different matter. I recorded that wish in a somewhat related
bug report.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog

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