Bug#87747: apt: fails to compare versions correctly

[Sam TH <sam@samth.dyndns.org>]

Package: apt
Version: 0.5.0
Severity: grave

The upgrade to APT 0.5 totally broke dependency calculation.  apt-get
upgrade gives the following (totally erroneous) error:

Sorry, but the following packages have unmet dependencies:
  apache-common: Depends: libc6 (>= 2.2.1) but 2.2.2-1 is to be installed
  binstats: Depends: debianutils (>= 1.13.1) but 1.15 is to be installed
  wvdial: Depends: libc6 (>= 2.1.94) but 2.2.2-1 is to be installed

Note that the package versions required are all less than those
installed.  dpkg --compare-versions correctly compares these versions
correctly, as in this output:

[sam@samth ~]$ dpkg --compare-versions 2.2.1 "<=" 2.2.2-1 && echo 1    
1

Installation of debs manually with dpkg also works properly, with none
of these complaints.  It is merely apt that has difficulty.  

It seems, although I'm very much not sure about this, that the bug
relates to comparing versions where the lesser one has more components
than the greater (2.2.1-1 vs 2.2.2, etc).  

-- System Information
Debian Release: testing/unstable
Kernel Version: Linux samth.dyndns.org 2.4.1-pre9 #3 Sat Jan 20 17:59:11 CST 2001 i686 unknown

Versions of the packages apt depends on:
ii  libc6          2.2.2-1        GNU C Library: Shared libraries and Timezone
ii  libstdc++2.10  2.95.2-14      The GNU stdc++ library