Re: Bug#798714: debian-policy: Please explicitly recommend punctuation between the year, month and day components of date based version numbers

[Matthias Urlichs <matthias@urlichs.de>]

Hi,

Axel Beckert:
> To demonstrate my point, please sort the following version numbers in
> your head:
> 
> * 20110111.0

So? It's obviously a date, and there's no reason to suspect it to be in YDM
form or something even more horrible.

> And now compare the same dates, but written with punctuation:
> 
> * 2011.01.11.0

Wrong punctuation. ISO says to use hyphens and this is what I expect in a
YMD date. Dates with periods in them are supposed to be DMY in Germany and
(most likely) other countries.
(Along the same lines, I expect anything of the form XX/YY/ZZ to be a M/D/Y
date until proven wrong because 99% of US dates are written that way.)

Also, this form does not parse as well, visually, since there's no clear
distinction between "date" and "not part of the date".

I know that we can't use hyphens in native packages, but frankly I regard
the existence of native packages to be a bug in itself -- even debian-only
code (or documentation) has a "content" part and a "these bits only exist
in order to build a binary package" part. Also, yyyy-mm-dd-vv also doesn't
have much of a visual distinction between the date and the packaging
version, so that's not optimal either.

-- 
-- Matthias Urlichs