Re: cvs versioning

[Peter S Galbraith <p.galbraith@globetrotter.net>]

Arnaud Vandyck <avdyk@debian.org> wrote:

> Paul Brossier <piem-lists@altern.org> writes:
> 
> > I am working on packages from cvs upstream sources.  How should I name
> > their debian version ? I give a few examples below.
> >
> > Is there a spec for this somewhere ?
> 
> In the policy?
> 
> /usr/share/doc/debian-policy/policy.txt.gz
> 
> 3.2.1. Version numbers based on dates
> -------------------------------------
> 
> ...
>      However, in some cases where the upstream version number is based
>      on a date (e.g., a development "snapshot" release) the package
>      management system cannot handle these version numbers without
>      epochs.  For example, dpkg will consider "96May01" to be greater
>      than "96Dec24".
> 
>      To prevent having to use epochs for every new upstream version, the
>      version number should be changed to the following format in such
>      cases: "19960501", "19961224".  It is up to the maintainer whether
>      he/she wants to bother the upstream maintainer to change the
>      version numbers upstream, too.

I started a thread on -policy recently where I suggested this was bad
and should be something like 0.19960501 instead, to avoid epochs when
upstream finally declares a 1.0 release.

Peter