[colug-432] semantic versioning

[R P Herrold]

This post crossed both the RPM and the RPM5 mailing lists as 
indicated.  I mentioned it last night as to 'newest'

-- Russ herrold


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 6 Nov 2014 03:40:07
From: Andreas Maier <MAIERA at de.ibm.com>
Reply-To: General discussion about the RPM package manager
    <rpm-list at lists.rpm.org>
To: RPM Mailing List <rpm-list at lists.rpm.org>
Subject: rh-rpm] RPM support for semantic versioning


Hi,
Apologies if this has been discussed before, but I did not find it using
G**gle... So here we go:

I would like to use semantic versioning (see http://semver.org/) in a
package. One particular definition in semantic versioning is that of a
"pre-release". Quoting from its web page:

   9. A pre-release version MAY be denoted by appending a hyphen and a
      series of dot separated identifiers immediately following the patch
      version. Identifiers MUST comprise only ASCII alphanumerics and
      hyphen [0-9A-Za-z-]. Identifiers MUST NOT be empty. Numeric
      identifiers MUST NOT include leading zeroes. Pre-release versions
      have a lower precedence than the associated normal version. A
      pre-release version indicates that the version is unstable and might
      not satisfy the intended compatibility requirements as denoted by its
      associated normal version. Examples: 1.0.0-alpha, 1.0.0-alpha.1,
      1.0.0-0.3.7, 1.0.0-x.7.z.92.

According to this definition, a pre-version "1.2.3-beta.1" is *older* than
the normal version "1.2.3".

However, RPM considers that pre-version to be *younger* than the normal
version.

RPM instead supports the tilde to denote pre-versions, so "1.2.3~beta.1" is
considered older than "1.2.3".

My questions are:
1. Is there support in RPM today, for correctly treating pre-versions
according to the semantic versioning definition?
2. If not, can it be added, maybe with an option?

Andy

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