Re: RFS: directnet -- A serverless, mesh network instant messaging client
Thijs Kinkhorst <kink@squirrelmail.org> writes:
> On Tue, January 3, 2006 09:47, Gregor Richards wrote:
>> I updated the package to 1.0.0. The version compare algorithm doesn't
>> like it ... it thinks that 1.0.0 is less than 1.0.0rc5 ... but that's
>> not how release candidates work :)
> That's indeed a caveat on the Debian version compare algorithm. When
> you're packaging a release candidate, you normally should watch out for
> adding 'rcN' to the version to avoid being able to update it to the real
> version later.
> What's done commonly is something like this: 0.9.9+1.0.0rc5, or for a
> higher version: 2.4.3+2.4.4rc1. So you take the version number one
> lower, you concatenate the real version with a plus in between. The
> algorithm will handle this correctly and the archive will accept a
> subsequent upload of 1.0.0 or 2.4.4 proper.
The other sneaky trick you can pull is that you can upload 1.0.0rc5 as
1.0rc5, which will sort before 1.0.0 and still means the same thing to
most people. This only works well for packages with three-part version
numbers that are doing rc releases before a new .0 release, but that's a
fairly common case.
(I suppose it could work for two-part version numbers too -- 2rc3 before
2.0. But it looks stranger.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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