Frank Küster wrote: > By the way, why are only alphanumerics, . and + allowed in version > numbers? If this were less resctrictive, one could do > > dpkg --compare-versions 1-3_sarge.1 gt 1-3.1; echo $? In part so that filenames can be parsed easily. If package names and version numbers could contain underscores, then we couldn't use the underscore to reliably parse a filename into package and version: gimp_2_2.0.1-1_sarge.1_i386.deb