Bug#943718: reportbug-gtk is reporting that up-to-date software is out-of-date

[Fabrice BAUZAC-STEHLY <noon@mykolab.com>]

Hello Jason,

I think you are mistaken in the way version numbers are compared in
Debian.

Version 7.5.3 is really considered newer than 7.5.3~deb10u1 (beware, it
is a tilde, not a dash):

# ge = "greater or equal"
$ dpkg --compare-versions 7.5.3 ge "7.5.3~deb10u1"; echo $?
0  # means "true"

Indeed, according to the Debian Policy [1]:

  The lexical comparison is a comparison of ASCII values modified so
  that all the letters sort earlier than all the non-letters and so that
  a tilde sorts before anything, even the end of a part.  For example,
  the following parts are in sorted order from earliest to latest: ‘~~’,
  ‘~~a’, ‘~’, the empty part, ‘a’.

Therefore I guess this bugreport can be closed as invalid, but I prefer
to let others decide.

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#version

Thanks!

Best regards

--
Fabrice BAUZAC-STEHLY
PGP 015AE9B25DCB0511D200A75DE5674DEA514C891D