Re: Changing version scheme for the evolution projects

Jeremy Bicha via desktop-devel-list <[email protected]> Fri, 16 Sep 2022 10:03:49 -0400
Newsgroups gmane.comp.gnome.desktop
Message-ID <CAD+GYvzdAE0Ej5D0464Wdh=6N_M48xshT53r5bMdJHMhmaqorg@mail.gmail.com>
On Fri, Sep 16, 2022 at 9:41 AM Michael Catanzaro <[email protected]> wrote:
> In contrast, everyone knows how to handle alpha/beta/rc and knows what
> they mean. Just use tildes instead of periods in the appstream metadata
> (43~alpha, etc.)

Debian and its derivatives have a similar problem with the GNOME 40
style pre-release version numbering. We have to rewrite the versions
to use tildes instead of periods. It looks like Fedora is having to do
that too.

So we have a situation where it's requiring extra version mangling by
both distros and GNOME maintainers (to translate the version for the
AppStream metadata format), I believe distros have figured out
workarounds and updated their packaging scripts a while ago, but the
AppStream situation is probably needing manual work by GNOME
maintainers and mistakes are made.

I think we could save everyone some work by just making the tilde
style official instead of periods for pre-releases.

Thank you,
Jeremy Bicha