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

[Florian Weimer]

* Guillem Jover:

> The same problem arises with non-significant zeros before digits, for
> example:
>
>   0.001 == 0.1 == 00:000.1
>
> Although this might be trickier to see in the wild, as dpkg itself
> would not normalize these versions, but an unknowing packager could
> generate those (somehow) thinking they are different.

But I think all implementations (except an obscure Ocaml one) agree on
the first equality.  Leading zeros are not significant here.

On top of that, dpkg's epoch comparison algorithm yields different
results on different architectures, and does not actually implement
what is specified in policy.  This has been known for a while.  It
would be great with dpkg and APT (and thus dak by extension) could
finally use exactly the same code.  If that is not possible, policy
could be changed to allow only versions where both implementtions
agree.