Re: Help with uscan

[Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au>]

Erik de Castro Lopo <mle+debian@mega-nerd.com> writes:

>    http://zhevny.com/specimen/files/specimen-0.5.2-rc3.tar.gz

Okay. The current list at <URL:http://zhevny.com/specimen/files/> shows
the following tarball files:

    specimen-0.5.1.1.tar.gz
    specimen-0.5.1.tar.gz
    specimen-0.5.2-rc1.tar.gz
    specimen-0.5.2-rc2.tar.gz
    specimen-0.5.2-rc3.tar.gz

I will work on the assumption that there will, in future, be a
‘specimen-0.5.2.tar.gz’ and that the intended meaning will be for that
to be *later* than all the above.


As it stands, though, ‘0.5.2’ will always compare earlier than
‘0.5.2ANYTHINGATALL’, the opposite of what your upstream apparently
wants; which is why special keywords in version strings throw a spanner
in the works.

But the clever Debian folks have come up with a reasonably sane way to
accomodate weird upstream version-comparison perversions. That is done
with an exception to the comparisons, using the tilde ‘~’ (see Debian
policy §5.6.12. for the details).

So you'll need to mangle the upstream version string into a version
string that will actually compare the way upstream expects it to:

    # debian/watch
    # Debian uscan file for ‘libspecimen’ package.
    # Manpage: uscan(1)

    # Compulsory line, this is a version 3 file.
    version=3

    # Current version from Cheese Shop.
    opts="uversionmangle=s/-([a-z]+\d+)$/~$1/" \
        http://zhevny.com/specimen/files/specimen-(.+).tar.gz

Using that watch file, I get the following result:

    $ uscan --package libspecimen --upstream-version 0.5.1 --watchfile watch 
    libspecimen: Newer version (0.5.2~rc3) available on remote site:
      http://zhevny.com/specimen/files/specimen-0.5.2-rc3.tar.gz
      (local version is 0.5.1)
    Not downloading as --package was used.  Use --download to force
    downloading.


Hope that helps.

-- 
 \         “Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free |
  `\          than Christianity has made them good.” —Henry L. Mencken |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney