Greetings, I have been working on adding a class to QtCore (QVersion) to support storing version numbers, convert to/from QString, and having comparison operators. My goal was to provide an API to assist in the following use cases:
- Plugin loading where there are multiple versions on the same system. - File format validation. - Executing an already installed command line application where the behavior is dependent on the called application's version. - Performing software installations and updates. - QMake support for version number comparisons. Please share other potential use cases where this might be useful. I am not restring the use of this class for just Qt's needs and that is where a lot of discussion about functionality has come up. You can see the progress for this patch at https://codereview.qt-project.org/82170. The current implementation supports 0 to N numerical segments and a QString suffix. Currently, the restrictions for numerical segments are that they cannot be negative. The restrictions for the suffix are that it cannot start with a number and it cannot contain any white space. Beyond that, there are some things that need to be defined: 1. What level of support for Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 ( http://www.semver.org) should be supported? 2. What semantics should be used for version comparisons? Numerical segments are more clearly defined but when introducing a non-null suffix, many different methods are being proposed. 1. Should suffixes be compared purely lexicographically? Case sensitive or insensitive? 1. e.g. "1.0-beta11" < "1.0-beta2" < "1.0-Beta2" 2. Should numerical portions in a suffix be pulled out compared differently? 1. e.g. "1.0-beta2" < "1.0-beta11" 3. Should the suffix be checked for key words to assist in comparisons? 1. alpha 2. beta 3. gamma 4. rc 4. Should there be a special case where single character suffixes have a higher precedent to multi-character suffixes? 1. e.g. "1.0alpha" < "1.0" < "1.0a" 3. Are there any other versioning semantics that should be supported? The biggest question of all, should this even be included in QtCore? Thanks, Keith
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