Ordering of versions

[mark.reinhold at oracle.com]

2011/11/9 10:45 -0800, njbartlett at gmail.com:
> What determines the split into 2 tokens, i.e. why is "1B" parsed as 2
> tokens whereas "10" is just 1 token?

Version strings are tokenized at alpha/numeric/punctuation boundaries,
and punctuation is discarded.

>                                      Does this mean that 1B is
> equivalent to 1.B?

Yes.

>                    Is "beta" parsed as 4 tokens, b.e.t.a?

No, it's just "beta".

> Perhaps I should read the code as Glyn is doing, but a proper
> description of how the versioning is *intended* to work would be
> better.

No argument there.  The prototype is inspired by, though not identical
to, Debian's version-comparison algorithm [1].  We've intentionally not
spent a lot of time designing and specifying this yet because we know
there is such a wide variety of opinions and experiences to be taken
into account, as demonstrated by this very thread.

- Mark


[1] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Version