Warren's Package Naming Proposal - Revision 2

[Pozsar Balazs]

On Fri, Nov 07, 2003 at 10:20:28AM -1000, Warren Togami wrote:

> C-3. Non-Numeric Version to Release
> -----------------------------------
> As mentioned above in section B (Version) and C-2 (Vepoch), non-numeric 
> versioned packages can be problematic so they must be treated with care. 
>  These are cases where the upstream version has letters rather than 
> simple numbers in their version.  Often they have tags like alpha, beta, 
> rc, or letters like a and b denoting that it is a version before or 
> after the number.  Read section B to understand why we cannot simply put 
> these letters into the version tag.
> 
> Release Tag for Pre-Release Packages:
>      0.%{X}.%{alphatag}
> Release Tag for Non-Numeric Post-Release Packages:
>      %{X}.%{alphatag}
> Where %{X} is the vepoch increment, and %{alphatag} is the string that
> came from the version.
[...]

PLEASE, take a look at dpkg's and apt-get's way of handling pre-release 
versions, I really do think that should be used in rpm-based distros 
too.
The idea is to introduce a character, namely '~' (tilde), which is 
sorted specially: in comparison it comes before anything else.

This way, you can get ordering like this:

1.0~alpha1 < 1.0~alpha2 < 1.0~beta < 1.0 < 1.0a < 1.0b
1.0~pre1 < 1.0~rc1 < 1.0 < 1.0.1 < 1.0.2
... and so on.

Hope you got the point.

I know it should be implemented in rpm, and this is not a trivial move, 
but please do think about it. It will make all these 
pre-release-versioning nightmares go away.


bye,
-- 
pozsy