[101627] trunk/dports/python/py-spyder-devel/Portfile

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Jan 16, 2013, at 00:21, Eric A. Borisch wrote:

> On Tuesday, January 15, 2013, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> It can't be changed for py-spyder-devel now, but for other ports in the future, please just increase the epoch by one when it's needed. There's no reason for the epoch to be formatted to look like a date, and doing so will just be confusing years down the road.
>> 
>> http://guide.macports.org/chunked/reference.html#reference.keywords
> 
> Ok. I kind like the date formatted ones (has more information encoded in it than '1') and they seem to meet the "only requirements" from the guide. But if minimal bumps are desired, so be it.

But it doesn't encode any information, at least, not any that the user can rely upon. Today you updated the epoch to an integer that looks like today's date, but only because you had to because upstream version numbering required it. When at some point in the future you update the port to, say, version 2.2.1something, there will be no requirement for you to increase the epoch. So you are either a) committing to the extra burden of forever updating the epoch to match the commit date, even when most of the time that won't be necessary (and running into potential problems if and when you find that you want to commit twice in one day), or b) allowing the epoch to remain unchanged when it doesn't need to be changed, in which case the number in the epoch carries no meaning at all. The end result is that the epoch should not be used to convey anything other than a sequence numbering; if a user wants to know a date when something was updated, they should look at the Subversion log.