Re: RFC: DEP-14: Recommended layout for Git packaging repositories

[Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>]

Bernhard R. Link writes ("Re: RFC: DEP-14: Recommended layout for Git packaging repositories"):
> Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> [141111 22:26]:
...
> > When a Git tag needs to refer to a specific version of a Debian package,
> > the Debian version needs to be mangled to cope with Git's restrictions.
> > The colon (`:`) needs to be replaced with a percent (`%`), and the tilde
> > (`~`) needs to be replaced with an underscore (`_`).
> 
> Is there a previous case of encoding colons with percent signs?
> If it is inventing a third way instead of using on of the existing ones,
> is sounds like a bad idea.

Raphael, is there precedent for this ?

Current practice seem so be to replace both : and ~ with _.  Unless we
expect to find version numbers matching ^\d+\~, then anything matching
^\d+_ is unambiguously an epoch.  Any _ elsewhere is unambigously ~.

I'm not opposed to changing this but I wonder whether changing it
would break anything.  Maybe it would be better to write a restriction
in the version number policy forbidding ^\d+\~

Ian.