[Fedora-packaging] using the tilde in tarball versions

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Wed, May 01, 2013 at 05:32:12PM +0200, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> On 01/05/13 16:56, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > On 05/01/2013 12:59 PM, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I've had a look at
> >> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=734802
> >>
> >> and I understand that tildes are supported by new versions of RPM, but
> >> not by Fedora infrastructure
> >>
> >> I'm currently trying to prepare an upstream project to build tarballs
> >> and I would like to use tildes in the version number of the test
> >> tarballs and distribute them through the upstream web site.

In answer to the original question, upstreams can do what they like
irregardless of rpm.  If an official fedora package were to be built using
your tarball we'd manually "normalize" the tilde to something else (probably
a dash).  Fedora policy is not to use tildes; it doesn't haveto do with what
the underlying technologies support.

> > Can you explain why do want to do so?
> >
> > To me personally, there is not any single reason for using ~ in
> > version numbers, except of lack of experience of upstreams, who do not
> > understand that ~ and other special characters ($€?!) cause a lot of
> > confusion.
> >
> There are various factors in this particular project that will lead to
> confusion, the existence of 3 forks each releasing with the same name
> probably makes the question of tildes look rather tame
> 
> For my purposes, these are not official releases and will not be tagged
> in the upstream repository, so they can't have names like
> project-3.3.0.tar.gz
> 
> The goal is to release project-3.3.0.tar.gz in a few weeks.
> 
> I am working on trunk which has 3.3 in AC_INIT.  There is a 3.2 branch
> and that is unrelated to this work.
> 
> Therefore, using names like project-3.3.0~test1.tar.gz makes it clear that:
> 
> project-3.2*.tar.gz  < project-3.3.0~test1.tar.gz < project-3.3.0.tar.gz
> 
> Using a name like project-3.2.999.nextrelease.1.tar.gz would also ensure
> proper sequencing but I feel that is more confusing.
> 
project-3.3.0-test1.tar.gz would also seem to work just as well and
additionally won't run into specialcases where people are using regexes to
parse version strings and they don't anticipate a tilde being used.

The tilde doesn't designate that general sorting algorithms will place the
filename before the base version in the general tools case.  It is only
special tools that recognize that usage.

-Toshio
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