Package: dpkg-dev,debian-policy Severity: wishlist X-Debbugs-Cc: po...@debian.org
Hi Guillem and policy editors, Emilio and me noticed that policy and dpkg have subtly different ideas of what is a version. While man deb-version says | The upstream-version may contain only alphanumerics (“A-Za-z0-9”) | and the characters . + - : ~ (full stop, plus, hyphen, colon, tilde) | and should start with a digit. Debian policy section 5.6.1 says | The upstream_version must contain only alphanumerics 6 and the | characters . + - ~ (full stop, plus, hyphen, tilde) and should start | with a digit. If there is no debian_revision then hyphens are not | allowed. Technically speaking, it is fine for policy to forbid things that dpkg allows. Other distributions based on dpkg may use a different policy and allow using multiple colons. Still is is an odd aspect and may cause confusion. Is this difference intentional? If yes, would it make sense to add a footnote to policy hinting that it is more restrictive than dpkg? I also checked packages in unstable and found no packages with a version containing two colons (i.e. all packages are policy-compliant in this regard). Thanks for considering Helmut
