[Ubuntu] Introduction and introductory question

[ircwaves]

Hello All,

I am a long time Debian/Ubuntu user, and now I do a good deal of
pretty basic geospatial programming and administration of systems for
GIS analysts.  The DebianGIS/UbuntuGIS repositories have been
invaluable, and I thank you all for the time and effort you have
contributed.  Maybe at some point I will be able to contribute a build
or trivial fix.

Question first: Why is the UbuntuGIS qgis package using the dpkg
version epoch at the moment?

Boring motivating details:  I am fairly novice when it comes to
roll-your-own .deb package, because I have never needed to before.
The reason I've looked into this is that work files take advantage of
the scale and offset parameters in GeoTIFF files, and there was
recently a fix committed into the QuantumGIS source code
(https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/commit/914ecc9c0980012b27b15ce5616cf5541da66f55)
that appears to have been merged into the release-2_8 branch.
Empirically seeing that the fix wasn't there in the version on
UbuntuGIS, I grabbed the source, build the debs, tested that the fix
worked, and added a local repo sources.list.d.  Unfortunately, apt-get
wouldn't install the newer version because of the epoch.  I can just
add the epoch to my package, but then I'd have to keep an eye on the
repo to see when a newer version of qgis makes its way there.

Anyway, thanks for any information and your time,
Ian

-- 
/**
 * Ian
 *
 * "Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les
esprits préparés"
 */