[aur-general] Upstream version numbers that break pacman version comparison

[Baptiste Jonglez]

Hi,

I maintain a package in the AUR [1], coq [2], whose upstream versioning
scheme is a bit strange.

Basically, they release versions in the following order:

    8.4 → 8.4pl1 → 8.4pl2 → 8.5 → 8.5pl1 → etc

This breaks pacman's comparison function.  For instance, with a local
repo, pacman does not consider that the new version 8.5pl3-1 is newer than
the old 8.5-1:

    # pacman -Syu
    warning: coq: local (8.5-1) is newer than repo (8.5pl3-1)

This makes sense given the documented behaviour of pacman(8):

    When upgrading, pacman performs version comparison to determine which
    packages need upgrading. This behavior operates as follows:

    Alphanumeric:
      1.0a < 1.0b < 1.0beta < 1.0p < 1.0pre < 1.0rc < 1.0 < 1.0.a < 1.0.1
    Numeric:
      1 < 1.0 < 1.1 < 1.1.1 < 1.2 < 2.0 < 3.0.0

What is the best solution to deal with this?  I think I can either map the
scheme to a more reasonable one (e.g. "8.5.pl3" instead of "8.5pl3"), or
bump the epoch when needed.

Thanks,
Baptiste

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/coq/
[2] https://coq.inria.fr/
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