Packaging snapshots

[Kai Hendry <hendry@iki.fi>]

Just wondering about packaging snapshots of a package.

Ok, snapshots could be known as "backups". Here I am talking about
pulling from say a Subversion repository and building a package.

For now I want to do this just to keep tabs on what upstream has
planned. Not so much for unstable...



I remember being a little bewildered by the version string in Debian. Is
this OK?

frodo$ apt-cache show irssi-snapshot | grep Version:
Version: 0.8.6+cvs.20031114-1

And how does that compare to:

frodo$ apt-cache show gcc-snapshot | grep Version:
Version: 20051008-1


Is this documented somewhere?

http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Version

Could be elaborated on with examples. Be good if the dates were iso8601
style:
date --iso-8601=hours

2005-10-18T16+1000

But then they would be twice as long...

Best wishes,