Emailing both debian-devel and the Debian GNOME mailing list. I am requesting project approval for me to upload gnome-calculator with an epoch.
Five years ago, gcalctool 6.4 was renamed to gnome-calculator and renumbered to 3.8. This seemed like a clear case for an epoch since this was a permanent change in the version numbering scheme. I made this change in the Debian VCS and uploaded it to Ubuntu. At the time I did not have upload rights to Debian and Ubuntu has deadlines. A month later, a Debian GNOME team member recognized that we could use a dh_gencontrol hack [1] to only add the epoch to the gcalctool transitional package and we didn't need an epoch for gnome-calculator. Similarly, we could have used this hack for many of the gnome-games packages when they were split into separate source packages but we didn't because we uploaded them before we made this change. (The version numbering didn't change but gnome-games had an epoch we didn't need to carry to the new packages.) More recently, I have worked to reduce the difference between Debian and Ubuntu packaging for many GNOME packages. It gets very tedious to need to upload gnome-calculator in Debian and then do a separate upload in Ubuntu (along with all the required Vcs merging, updating and tagging) just to add the epoch in Ubuntu. It would be a lot nicer if I could just sync the Debian package to Ubuntu. So is it appropriate to bump an epoch in Debian to match an important downstream's epoch? [1] Current example of the hack: https://salsa.debian.org/fonts-team/fonts-ubuntu/blob/debian/unstable/debian/rules Thanks, Jeremy Bicha
