On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 10:53:16AM -0500, Dan McGee <dpmcgee@gmail.com> wrote:
Either way, I'm not convinced there is a right answer to what is greater and lesser, but it does warrent looking into as the behavior changed. I did see some comments in the new code alluding to some upstream changes that may have been related to version numbers similar to this.
here is what upstream usually does: 1.0pre1 < 1.0rc1 < 1.0 < 1.0a if the package manager doesn't know anything about what 'a', 'pre' or 'rc' means, you can't handle all the situations. pacman (before the recent change, i haven't bisected it) handled pre/rc properly and package maintainers had to do hacks for 1.0a-like releases (samba, etc). if we want to improve this, then probably the way to go is something like what gentoo does: they have regex like (alpha|beta|rc|pre|p)(\d*)$ and handle the situation in such cases. of course if you add such a complexity then you can say 1.0a is greater than 1.0, and handle the prereleases manually.