[pacman-dev] vercmp behavior changed on "1.5b versus 1.5" compare

[Miklos Vajna]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 10:53:16AM -0500, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at 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.
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