Re: Is dpkg --compare-versions canonical?
Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> writes:
> Thanks for the confirmation!
>
> martin f krafft <madduck@debian.org> writes:
>> also sprach Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> [2005.08.23.1908 +0200]:
>
>>> Is there a document anywhere outside of the dpkg source that explains
>>> the algorithm for how version numbers are ordered by the archive
>>> software?
>
>> http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Version
>
> *sigh*. I'm sorry about that; I've read that several times but thought
> something more complex was going on under the hood, since it didn't seem
> to explain this case. I completely missed the following sentence:
>
> | The lexical comparison is a comparison of ASCII values modified so that
> | all the letters sort earlier than all the non-letters.
>
> which does indeed entirely explain why "rc" sorts before ".".
>
> Thank you for the kick in the right direction!
It is out of date since it does not explain ~ yet. Maybe, if you have
the time and since you just looked at the matter closely anyway, you
could draw up a few lines and send a patch?
MfG
Goswin
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