On Wed, 26 Sep 2018, Jeremy Bicha wrote: > So is it appropriate to bump an epoch in Debian to match an important > downstream's epoch?
Yes. Precisely because there is collaboration between both sides on those packages. The attitude "we don't care of mistakes made by derivatives" is counter-productive. In the context of packages shared by Kali and Debian, there have been times where I requested an upload on the Debian side to increase the version to something bigger than what we had in Kali so that we could sync (it was not an epoch bump, mainly a different way to name git snapshots IIRC) and the maintainer accepted. On the opposite side, Debian has been importing packages from Kali and sometimes the maintainer picked the same .orig.tar.gz with a different checksum and this made it impossible to sync the package (reprepro like dak can't deal with different copies of the same file). I had to remove all copies of the source package in Kali (including snapshots that should not be modified) to be able to import. I could have requested the Debian maintainer to change the upstream version (say with a +ds suffix) but I did not do that. I cut some slack to the careless Debian maintainer and I expect them to cut some slack to us as derivative as well when we need some help to make our life easier. Cheers, -- Raphaël Hertzog ◈ Debian Developer Support Debian LTS: https://www.freexian.com/services/debian-lts.html Learn to master Debian: https://debian-handbook.info/get/
