Bug#883134: general: Add new package header Upstream-Version:

[Victor Porton <porton@narod.ru>]

Package: general
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainers,

I propose to add new package header Upstream-Version: to contain the version
as of the upstream of the package.

The header should be optional because not every package has a definite
upstream version.

I am writing software which should call a program in specific version range
(or fail to call it if the program in this version range is not installed).
It should work for Debian and other systems (so I can use only the upstream
version, not Debian version as is, to be compatible with other systems).

Adding this header would ease the task to extract the upstream version of a
specific package.

It is possible now, but the algorithm of extracting the version of upstream
may be different for every package. This is no good.

My software should work not only on Debian. So writing a special algorithm
to extract Debian version numbers (instead of simply looking into
Upstream-Version:) is not a good way to do this task.

Somebody, please report a similar idea for Fedora, SUSE and others. (I don't
have it installed and don't know the proper way to report to them.)

-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (990, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 4.13.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)