Warren's Package Naming Proposal - Revision 2

[Pozsar Balazs]

On 10 Nov 2003, Alexandre Oliva wrote:

> On Nov 10, 2003, Pozsar Balazs <pozsy at uhulinux.hu> wrote:
>
> >> Release: 2.8
> >> Prerelease: 2.8pre1   (Prerelease of version 2.9)
>
> > Could you give me an example of this? (Imho this scheme is
> > braindamaged...) I've never seen any projects with this versioning.
>
> Autotools (autoconf, automake and libtool) have agreed to use such a
> scheme quite a while ago, and one of the reasons behind such a scheme
> was exactly to accomodate RPM's versioning rules.

[...]

Okay, I understand your example. I was focusing on 'pre', which I still
think is not used this way, but other postfixes, most commonly
'a', 'b', 'c'... are do used.

But, as you also mention, these schemes can be handled long ago easily, so
they do not need fixing, and they do not need the usage of the proposed
'~' special tag.

You might misunderstood me: the purpose of the '~' marking is _NOT_ to use
it every time when a version number is kind of 'pre', but to use it when
you want to express ordering impossible (without 'hacks') without it.

So 1.4.0 < 1.4.0a < 1.4.0b < 1.4.1 is perfectly ordered now and ever,
but if you want to order '1.4.0', '1.4.1-pre1' and '1.4.1' you either have
to use tricks, or simply use '~':
   1.4.0 < 1.4.1~pre1 < 1.4.1


ps: sorry if this is overexplanation, shoot me :)

-- 
pozsy