As Josip R. suggested, I'm forwarding my original reply to the "Re:
0.01-6 > 0.1-3" thread on debian-devel here to debian-policy.
Apparently there are some readers/developers/etc. who do not understand
the differrence between common software versioning practices, integer
arithmatic, and real number arithmatic. A more detailed explaination of
the concept of delimiters such as the "full stop" or "plus" should be
written.
Original message:
How about a slight change in grammar to clarify things.
(s/numerical/integer/) The integer 01 == 1 :. 0.01 == 0.1. I would
agree that the use of "full stops" (".") and such should be
discussed. I understand the implied use of the "full stop" is to
delimit integer values of software versions, but not everyone does,
apparently.
On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 12:35:32PM +1000, Firewall wrote:
> "The numerical values of these two parts are compared, and any
> difference found is returned as the result of the comparison", so
> if we compare two version, 0.01 and 0.1 then the (numerical)
> difference is +/- 0.09 not 0.
--- policy.sgml.orig Mon Apr 22 23:15:19 2002
+++ policy.sgml Mon Apr 22 23:21:11 2002
@@ -1788,7 +1788,7 @@
<p>
Then the initial part of the remainder of each string which
consists entirely of digit characters is determined. The
- numerical values of these two parts are compared, and any
+ integer values of these two parts are compared, and any
difference found is returned as the result of the comparison.
For these purposes an empty string (which can only occur at
the end of one or both version strings being compared) counts
--
Chad Walstrom <chewie@wookimus.net> | a.k.a. ^chewie
http://www.wookimus.net/ | s.k.a. gunnarr
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