Please review Policy change for ~ in versions
Hello dpkg developers,
Could you please review the following patch to Debian Policy to document
the use of ~ in version numbers and confirm that this matches dpkg's
behavior? I'd like to get this into Policy since it's already in
widespread use in the archive, but the Policy proposal has gotten very few
comments.
Thanks!
--- policy.sgml.orig 2006-06-19 22:20:13.000000000 -0700
+++ policy.sgml 2006-09-08 13:09:35.000000000 -0700
@@ -2649,8 +2649,8 @@
Alphanumerics are <tt>A-Za-z0-9</tt> only.
</footnote>
and the characters <tt>.</tt> <tt>+</tt> <tt>-</tt>
- <tt>:</tt> (full stop, plus, hyphen, colon) and should
- start with a digit. If there is no
+ <tt>:</tt> <tt>~</tt> (full stop, plus, hyphen, colon,
+ tilde) and should start with a digit. If there is no
<var>debian_revision</var> then hyphens are not allowed;
if there is no <var>epoch</var> then colons are not
allowed.
@@ -2663,8 +2663,8 @@
This part of the version number specifies the version of
the Debian package based on the upstream version. It
may contain only alphanumerics and the characters
- <tt>+</tt> and <tt>.</tt> (plus and full stop) and is
- compared in the same way as the
+ <tt>+</tt> <tt>.</tt> <tt>~</tt> (plus, full stop,
+ tilde) and is compared in the same way as the
<var>upstream_version</var> is.
</p>
@@ -2713,7 +2713,10 @@
which may be empty) are compared lexically. If a difference
is found it is returned. The lexical comparison is a
comparison of ASCII values modified so that all the letters
- sort earlier than all the non-letters.
+ sort earlier than all the non-letters and so that a tilde
+ sorts before anything, even the end of a part. For example,
+ the following parts are in sorted order: <tt>~~<tt>,
+ <tt>~~a</tt>, <tt>~</tt>, the empty part, <tt>a</tt>.
</p>
<p>
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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