Warren's Package Naming Proposal - Revision 2

[Warren Togami]

Pozsar Balazs wrote:
> 
> PLEASE, take a look at dpkg's and apt-get's way of handling pre-release 
> versions, I really do think that should be used in rpm-based distros 
> too.
> The idea is to introduce a character, namely '~' (tilde), which is 
> sorted specially: in comparison it comes before anything else.
> 
> This way, you can get ordering like this:
> 
> 1.0~alpha1 < 1.0~alpha2 < 1.0~beta < 1.0 < 1.0a < 1.0b
> 1.0~pre1 < 1.0~rc1 < 1.0 < 1.0.1 < 1.0.2
> ... and so on.
> 
> Hope you got the point.
> 
> I know it should be implemented in rpm, and this is not a trivial move, 
> but please do think about it. It will make all these 
> pre-release-versioning nightmares go away.
> 

Interesting concept.  This is the first time I heard of this.  It would 
take a serious amount of analysis to figure out if this can be 
implemented in rpm in a way that wont break backward compatibility. 
There is also the question of if we *want* to do this or not.  Much 
discussion is needed.  In any case it would take a long time to analyze 
if we want to implement this in rpm and all related tools or not.  I 
currently have no opinion on this matter because I don't know enough 
about it.

In the mean time this package naming scheme describes how to properly 
avoid packaging problems in the rpm of today.

Warren