[stefanor]

Debian has epochs, but it's a bad idea to use them for this purpose.

Two reasons:

1. Once you bump the epoch, you have to use it forever. 2. The deb filename often doesn't contain the epoch (we use a colon which isn't valid on many filesystems), so an epoch-revert will give the same file name as pre-epoch, which breaks your repository.

So, the current best practice is the +really+ thing.

[kzrdude]

Thanks for the info, the filename thing sounds like a problem, one aspect of the epoch system doesn't work for the purpose then.

[o11c]

Honestly, the Gentoo-style global blacklist (package.mask) to force a downgrade is probably a better approach for cases like this. Epochs only make sense if your upstream is insane and does not follow a consistent numbering system.

[account42]

Gentoo also considers the repository (+overlays) to be the entire set of possible versions so simply removing the bad version will cause a downgrade, unlike debian and RPM systems where installing packages outside a repository is supported.

[debianisajoke32]

Stop the cap your honor. There is not a single filesystem that prevents you from using colons in filenames except exfat, I went ahead and checked and ext4, xfs, btrfs, zfs, and even reiserfs let you use any characters you want except \0 and /.

And I fail to see why bumping the epoch would ever be a problem. Using the epoch not a reason why its bad.

[intel_brain]

Got this on OpenSUSE: `5.6.1.revertto5.4-3.2`