Bug#671084: lintian: warn against ~dfsg versions
Daniel Schepler <dschepler@gmail.com> writes:
> I've recently noticed a few instances of packages being assigned
> versions of something like 1.2~dfsg-3. That doesn't make sense: the ~
> character is supposed to be for marking pre-release version tags from
> upstream like ~beta2, while the "dfsg" tag means it's a repack of the
> upstream release to remove non-free files. The two conflict with each
> other. So it would be nice if Lintian would flag this as a probable
> error, and suggest using "1.2+dfsg-3" instead.
The reason I have heard for some maintainers intentionally doing this is
that they wanted to ensure that a package built from the canonical
upstream source would get a version that would sort later than the version
of the DFSG-stripped package. This could be important if, say, the
package was made DFSG-free by removing functionality; if someone built a
local version of the package with that functionality restored, they may
want the Debian version to upgrade cleanly to their local version.
I'm not sure Lintian should take a stand on this, since I know this
versioning scheme was intentional and done with thought for the
consequences in at least some cases.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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