[mosh-devel] Semantic versioning and package versioning

[john hood]

Hi Anders,

Apologies for the debian/changelog bugs, and thanks for fixing them. I
should have tested that with package builds before pushing to GitHub. I
tried to fix it on Friday, but got hung up on how to represent
"1.3.0-rc2" as a Debian version, and ran out of time. I think I
understand your change, but let me ask, since Debian package versioning
looks a bit like a black art from here:

* 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.

* 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?

regards,

--jh

[Anders Kaseorg]

Post by john hood
* 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.

Post by john hood
* 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