Package: general Severity: wishlist Dear Maintainers,
I propose to add new package header Upstream-Version: to contain the version as of the upstream of the package. The header should be optional because not every package has a definite upstream version. I am writing software which should call a program in specific version range (or fail to call it if the program in this version range is not installed). It should work for Debian and other systems (so I can use only the upstream version, not Debian version as is, to be compatible with other systems). Adding this header would ease the task to extract the upstream version of a specific package. It is possible now, but the algorithm of extracting the version of upstream may be different for every package. This is no good. My software should work not only on Debian. So writing a special algorithm to extract Debian version numbers (instead of simply looking into Upstream-Version:) is not a good way to do this task. Somebody, please report a similar idea for Fedora, SUSE and others. (I don't have it installed and don't know the proper way to report to them.) -- System Information: Debian Release: buster/sid APT prefers stable-updates APT policy: (990, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 4.13.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
