Re: libqwt-dev: apt reinstalls the package

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

Eugene V. Lyubimkin wrote:

> I agree it could be intepreted so, but I see no benefits in allowing
> trailing '-'. After all, it's just confusing.
>
> By the way, using this interpretation for epoch too, a version ':1.2.3'
> would be also correct?

No, a version ':1.2.3' would still not be allowed, since there is a
colon but the text before it ("") is not a number, violating

	This is a single (generally small) unsigned integer.

> ... so, I would rather amend the policy explicitly forbidding this
> special case.

Hmm.

I can imagine someone expecting "Depends: foo (<< 3.0-)" to be
accepted based on a naive view of versions in which they are mostly
compared lexically.  Such a person would most likely (wrongly) expect
"foo (3.0)" to satisfy the dependency.  So after thinking about it a
little, I agree --- it seems sensible to forbid such expressions to
avoid such pitfalls.

I can't imagine this rendering many existing non-buggy packages buggy,
since as this bug shows, the dpkg+apt combination doesn't seem to
handle version numbers with trailing '-' well yet anyway.

Thanks for your thoughtfulness.
Jonathan