On 29-Aug-2017, Hugo Lefeuvre wrote:
> Upstream has been quite responsive until now, so I propose to speak
> about it with him.
That's a good situation :-)
> Concerning the latter issue, there's no magic solution and this
> problem has been discussed for quite a while[0]. I like the
> 3.4.0final-1 solution because it avoids epoch usage.
Avoiding epoch usage is nice (Though epoch is also fine, to solve an
issue like this).
In the years since that 1998 discussion, Debian Policy has an almost
magic solution: an explicit
rule for making some longer version strings compare earlier than
shorter ones.
5.6.12. Version
[…] When comparing two version numbers […] The lexical comparison
is a comparison of ASCII values modified so that all the 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 from earliest to latest: "~~",
"~~a", "~", the empty part, "a".
[…] One common use of ~ is for upstream pre-releases. For example,
1.0~beta1~svn1245 sorts earlier than 1.0~beta1, which sorts
earlier than 1.0.
‘dpkg --compare-versions’ now follows this algorithm.
The version string “3.4.0~b3” will compare earlier than “3.4.0”. So we
can instruct UScan to mangle the upstream version string, separating
known pre-release markers by a “~” character to get the Debian
upstream version string.
For an example, see the packaging for ‘pysha3’ (the ‘debian/watch’ file).
> Do you have any personal preferences ?
For the immediate issue, we could have “3.4.0final-1” just to address
the existing prior Debian version.
In parallel, I think that the above upstream version mangling by UScan
should be part of the Debian packaging; that will address future
version strings from upstream.
--
\ “The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is |
`\ able to think things out for himself, without regard to the |
_o__) prevailing superstitions and taboos.” —Henry L. Mencken |
Ben Finney <bignose@debian.org>
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