so CPAN use something like 0.90_1 to mean 0.90_rc1 however I know that pacman see's this as 0.90.1 (essentially not literally) making it greater than 0.90. would just packaging it as 0.90_rc1 make it appear as less than 0.90?

I can't find any real docs on this -- Caleb Cushing

Take a look at the "format_cpan_ver" in my CPAN module in perl-xyne-arch. I wrote that to deal with both the old and new ways of formatting CPAN versions and it can handle release versions as well in a way that Pacman recognizes. You can just replace 'a' with 'rc' without further changes. The only caveat is that many (most?) CPAN packages on Arch completely ignore CPAN's version scheme and there seems to be a reluctance to standardize it (the line between simple and lazy is not always clear). If you have any questions about that or how I've dealt with other CPAN issues, reply directly to me and we can discuss it further off this list. Xyne