Re: Definition of alphanumeric?
>>"Julian" == Julian Gilbey <J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk> writes:
Julian> On Sun, Apr 01, 2001 at 03:50:39PM +0200, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
>> policy uses alphanumeric to define version numbers. Is this only a-zA-Z0-9,
>> or does this include the "_"? As the "_" is used as a seperator in Debian
>> package file names, this would be perverse, but I would like to stay on the
>> safe side.
Julian> No, only a-zA-Z0-9 should be allowed. I have no idea whether this is
Julian> enforced anywhere, but this should probably be spelled out in policy.
Here is what policy says, in part:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
<epoch>
This is a single (generally small) unsigned integer.
<upstream-version>
The <upstream-version> may contain only alphanumerics and the
characters `.' `+' `-' `:' (full stop, plus, hyphen, colon) and
should start with a digit. If there is no <debian-revision> then
hyphens are not allowed; if there is no <epoch> then colons are
not allowed.
<debian-revision>
The <debian-revision> may contain only alphanumerics and the
characters `+' and `.' (plus and full stop).
----------------------------------------------------------------------
So there is no component that takes merely alphanumerics;
policy is already quite explicit about this.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
>From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (19 Jan 01) [foldoc]:
alphanumeric
<character> A decimal digit or a letter (upper or lower case).
Typically, "letters" means only English letters ({ASCII} A-Z
plus a-z) but it may also include non-English letters in the
Roman alphabet, e.g., e-{acute}, c-{cedilla}, the {thorn
letter}, and so on. Perversely, it may also include the
{underscore} character in some contexts.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
I suggest we note that as far as policy is concerned,
alphanumeric has the most restrictive definition, namely,
<character> A decimal digit or a letter (upper or lower case), where
"letters" means only {ASCII} A-Z plus a-z (This can be an annotative
footnote).
manoj
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Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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