Re: Reminder: impending GNOME 1.4 RC1 deadline

[Ian Peters <itp ximian com>]

On Sun, Mar 11, 2001 at 01:00:48AM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> So there's a real problem at the heart of this that inspires "pre1",
> which is that you want to distinguish a beta/test release from an
> Officially Sanctioned Release That Experienced QA.
> 
> So a versioning scheme such as 1.2.0, 1.2.1, 1.2.3 does not do that.
> If 1.2.1 is a test and 1.2.3 is a real release there's no way to know.
> 
> We should probably have an official scheme for this, maybe 1.2.1.1 or
> something ;-)

This sounds perfectly reasonable to me.  Perhaps slightly unwieldy and
not immediately recognized as "beta", which is why I've always gone in
for the ".9x == almost there" scheme.

But I think you're right, we should just pick a standard (that works!) 
and stick with it.

Aside: for some fun, look at the function vercmp in the rpmlib
sources, or verrevcmp in the dpkg sources, for some fun.  Note
especially how Debian arbitrarily decided that all alphabetic
characters will sort lower than numeric characters in version strings.
Getting this right for the commonly used packaging systems beyond '.' 
separated sequences of digits can suck.

-- 
Ian Peters      "...it is 5 am and the sun has charred the other
itp gnu org      side of the earth and come back to us and painted
itp ximian com   the smoke over our heads an imperial violet..."