Re: Release rules Was: Re: [Monotone-devel] conflicts store vs show_conflicts

[Timothy Brownawell]

On 11/22/2010 07:23 AM, Thomas Keller wrote:
> We already append a suffix "dev" to development snapshots (i.e.
> "1.0dev") which get created on build farms like openSUSE's build
> service. Thomas Moschny said that this is suboptimal because of rpm's
> version comparison algorithms which would consider "1.0dev" newer than
> "1.0", so whatever we come up for the release numbering (which must have
> widespread support for rpm, dpkg and friends), should be applied in a
> similar way to this.
>
> Personally I don't care much whether we use numbers or appended strings,
> as long as the algorithms are smart enough to find "1.0-dev" (or
> whatever) older than "1.0-alpha1" (or whatever).

It looks like what rpm does is: split into all-alpha and all-numeric 
items, and then sort on string/numeric comparisons of each item, or sort 
on rand() if an item is numeric on one side and alpha on the other.

So if we go with appending strings we'd also have to append one for 
actual releases which I think has issues, "1.0-dev", "1.0-pre", 
"1.0-release" would sort properly... but then explodes horribly when we 
want to release a 1.0.1. Using "1.0-release-1" would work, but looks icky.

So I think basically rpm requires X.Y.Z even/odd scheme in order to 
distinguish release/dev. Which is annoying.

--
Timothy

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