[Pkg-xmpp-devel] purple-rocketchat: NMU for new upstream version and introducing epoch

[Nicolas Schier]

Dear Debian XMPP Maintainers,

TL;DR:
   I'd like to help out updating purple-rocketchat and would appreciate
   your feedback on NMUing purple-rocketchat and introducing an epoch.


While preparing what might become the base of a merge-request [1] for a
new version of purple-rocketchat, I came across a problem with the
versioning:

1. Previously, upstream used mercurial (bitbucket.org) for SCM w/o
   release tags.  Thus, we had the '~hg%Y%m%d.%(hash)' part in previous
   Debian versions.
   A few years ago, upstream moved to git [2], so we should change '~hg'
   to '~git', but orthographically '~git' is considered to be older than
   '~hg'.

2. Even though there was no single release tag 0.1, we have used '0.1'
   as base upstream version number.  Using a debian/watch file with
   uscan's git-HEAD scheme (e.g. as in [3]), results in auto-generated
   base version number '0.0', thus, these are always considered to be
   older than the previous '0.1' versions.

So, with updating to the new upstream repo and using uscan watch file,
we get this version change:

from 0.1~hg20200403.800ef89-1   (as currently in stable,testing,unstable)
to   0.0~git20220925.a8a887c-X  (cp. [1])

AFAIK, this requires the introduction of an epoch, after consulting
debian-devel.

Do you agree, or do you have other opinions?

Is it ok, if I try to update purple-rocketchat via NMU (sponsoring
needed)?

Kind regards,
Nicolas


[1]: https://salsa.debian.org/nsc/purple-rocketchat
[2]: https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-rocketchat
[3]: https://salsa.debian.org/nsc/purple-rocketchat/-/blob/debian/latest/debian/watch