[mosh-devel] Semantic versioning and package versioning

[Anders Kaseorg]

On Sun, 8 Jan 2017, john hood wrote:
> * Does Debian packaging versioning depend solely on the Debian version 
> number, or is any info extracted from or checked against the upstream's 
> version? Obviously, they *should* be correlated, for ease of use and 
> proper sorting, but I'm trying to understand how a Debian version number 
> may differ from the upstream's.

The only version number that matters to Debian is the one extracted from 
debian/changelog.  The format and comparison semantics of a Debian version 
number are described at 
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Version.

> * Is the version naming in Mosh sensible and logical from a Debian point of
> view?  I did assume that semantic versioning would fit OK with the Debian
> worldview, but I didn't actually check that.   And does anybody involved with
> other packaging systems want to comment?

You’ll have even more trouble writing 1.3.0-rc2 as a sensible Fedora 
version, because although RPM recently copied Debian’s decreasing ~ 
feature, it is not currently permitted in Fedora, which instead requires 
the rc suffix to be moved to the package release tag: 1.3.0-0.1.rc2 < 
1.3.0-1 (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Versioning).

By the way, all the pre-release examples on semver.org look like -rc.2 
instead of -rc2.  Based on my reading of the guidelines, I think this is 
important because they give -rc.9 < -rc.10 < -rc10 < -rc9.

Anders