Re: Beta version numbers

[sharkey@superk.physics.sunysb.edu]

> I'm having trouble figuring out how to properly handle beta versions
> without requiring an Epochs, or the inability to provide new source.
> 
> I've got sendmail-8.12.0.Beta5, but will eventually have sendmail-8.12.0-1.
> 
>  *) using sendmail-8.12.0-0Beta5 will allow 8.12.0-1 to superceed, but
>     runs problems of replacing the .orig.tar.gz file
> 
>  *) using sendmail-8.12.0.Beta5 would need an epoch to have 8.12.0 superceed
> 
> What is the recommended approach to handle this?

Well, I'm not quite sure what's best, but if you want something that would
work you could do something like:

sendmail-8.11.9+8.12.0.beta5

Assuming 8.11.9 is the last non-beta version.  The version string means
it's 8.11.9 plus patches to bring it up to 8.12.0.beta5, but not yet
an official 8.12.0 release.

Dpkg will sort packages like this:

sendmail-8.11.9-x
sendmail-8.11.9+8.12.0.beta4-x
sendmail-8.11.9+8.12.0.beta5-x
sendmail-8.11.9+8.12.0.beta6-x
sendmail-8.12.0-x

with different orig tarballs for each release above.

Eric