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