Resending since my previous email went to the moderation queue.
On Fri, Sep 16, 2022 at 9:41 AM Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org> wrote:
> In contrast, everyone knows how to handle alpha/beta/rc and knows what
> they mean. Just use tildes instead of periods in the appstream metadata
> (43~alpha, etc.)
Debian and its derivatives have a similar problem with the GNOME 40
style pre-release version numbering. We have to rewrite the versions
to use tildes instead of periods. It looks like Fedora is having to do
that too.
So we have a situation where it's requiring extra version mangling by
both distros and GNOME maintainers (to translate the version for the
AppStream metadata format), I believe distros have figured out
workarounds and updated their packaging scripts a while ago, but the
AppStream situation is probably needing manual work by GNOME
maintainers and mistakes are made.
I think we could save everyone some work by just making the tilde
style official instead of periods for pre-releases.
Arch changes prerelease versions as well, but we have to remove the period (40.rc -> 40rc) so that it orders before 40 or 40.0.
A tilde is handled the same as a period and would not help us.
