debian package versioning and revisioning format

[Bill Mitchell <mitchell@mdd.comm.mot.com>]

Apologies for restarting this tiresome thread.

In private email, which I hope he doesn't mind my repeating,
Miquel van Smoorenburg <miquels@debian.het.net> said:

>   I've made a small modification to dchanges that lets it
> process files without a revision in their name (this is needed
> for minicom and sysvinit, cause debian version == upstream version
> now).

Miquel's changes rely on dchanges knowing what extensions
to expect (.deb, .tar.gz, .diff.gz, and no others), making
it necessary to revise dchanges if these should ever change.
That's necessary to disambiguate VER from EXT when either or
both might contain '.' chars, without a '-' delimited REV field
between them.

Would it be possible to regularize debian package naming by
requiring a '-' delimited REVISION number after the VERSION number
(or, if it's conceptually more palatable, as a VERSION-suffix?)
This seems a small burden to place on debian package maintainers.

Packages originated for the debian project and either not used
outside of debian or never experiencing debian-specific revisions
could simply arbitrarily set the REVISION number to 0 or 1.

Package naming rules would be:

    <PKG>-<VER>-<REV>.<EXT>
with all parts required and
    <PKG> containing any printable chars
    <VER> containing any printable chars except '-'
    <REV> containing any printable chars except '-' and '.'
    <EXT> containing any printable chars except '-'

(this would be easier if <REV> and <EXT> were delimited by '-',
but the '.' delimiter is probably too ingrained to change now)