Re: Is dpkg --compare-versions canonical?

[Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>]

Thanks for the confirmation!

martin f krafft <madduck@debian.org> writes:
> also sprach Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> [2005.08.23.1908 +0200]:

>> Is there a document anywhere outside of the dpkg source that explains
>> the algorithm for how version numbers are ordered by the archive
>> software?

> http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Version

*sigh*.  I'm sorry about that; I've read that several times but thought
something more complex was going on under the hood, since it didn't seem
to explain this case.  I completely missed the following sentence:

| The lexical comparison is a comparison of ASCII values modified so that
| all the letters sort earlier than all the non-letters.

which does indeed entirely explain why "rc" sorts before ".".

Thank you for the kick in the right direction!

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>