non-integer epoch?

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Aug 11, 2018, at 10:13, René J.V. Bertin wrote:

> I've been using non-integer (but numerical) epochs in a few of my ports just because it made sense to set it e.g. to 5.1 when I started using the 5.1 branch in a port. AFAIK the property is purely internal so it could be anything (i.e. a string), much more so than the revision. In fact I thought MacPorts only uses it to divide the version timeline into individual epochs which don't have a chronological relationship among each other, no?
> 
> I can imagine that it won't be easy to change the type used internally for the epoch so this is not a suggestion to change it (but if possible, yeah, I think it'd be a good idea to make it a string entity).

epoch and revision were always meant to be nonnegative integers. In the latest version of MacPorts, this is now enforced.


> A question though: what epoch was being used for those ports of mine - just the `floor(epoch)` (or `(int)(epoch)`) value? If I'm going to have to correct my ports I'd just as well avoid the introduction of a new epoch ...

I have no idea.