versions numbers of tin & lynx (was Re: Recent upgrading notes.)
On Sun, 5 May 1996, Dale Scheetz wrote:
> Dpkg thinks the new version of ae is a downgrade (493 to 96) but installs
> it anyway. Will dselect do the right thing?
Yeah, I caught this one too...luckily I was watching the screen while
dselect was doing it's work. dselect won't do it right, I had to force
the upgrade with dpkg -i.
Other packages which have a similar problem are tin & lynx.
dselect thinks that tin-1.30b-4.deb (from contrib) is newer than
tin-1.3beta.950824-11.deb (from unstable)
dselect also thinks that lynx-2.4.2-1.deb (from stable) is newer than
lynx-2.4-FM-960316-1.deb (from unstable).
Is this a bug in dselect? Is the version string comparison too simple? I
don't know if it's even possibe to write something which could do an
accurate compare on such arbitrary version strings....
tin is easy to fix. the contrib version is no longer needed...or won't be
as soon as the a.out stable tree becomes history. Alternatively,
"tin-1.3beta.950824" can be renamed to "tin-1.3b.950824"
for lynx, maybe "lynx-2.4-FM-960316" should be "lynx-2.4.FM.960316"
All this just highlights the need for consistency in version numbers for
new releases of the same package.
I only noticed this when I installed debian onto a freshly formatted
disk using my full mirror of debian. After the install I noticed
that both tin and lynx were complaining that there was no entry in
/etc/termcap for my current terminal type. These errors didn't occur on
my main system which had been upgraded from 0.93r6 to 1.1...and thus had
a full termcap file.
It took me a while to figure out what was going on because I knew that
termcap had been obsoleted. Other people upgrading from 0.93r6 to 1.1
might not notice that they are still running the old a.out/termcap
versions of these packages rather than the new ELF/ncurses versions.
Craig
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