RPM support for semantic versioning

Andreas Maier MAIERA at de.ibm.com
Thu Nov 6 11:20:01 UTC 2014



Panu Matilainen wrote on 06.11.2014 11:59:06:
>
> On 11/06/2014 10:40 AM, Andreas Maier wrote:
> >
> > My questions are:
> > 1. Is there support in RPM today, for correctly treating pre-versions
> > according to the semantic versioning definition?
>
> No. In rpm (and dpkg as well), the hyphen is the delimiter character
> between name, version and release components and thus entirely illegal
> in version.
>
> Note that rpm and dpkg predate semantic version spec by more than a
> decade AFAICT so "correct" is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

Agreed. I just wanted to express semantic version compatibility, and
not judge RPM versioning vs. semantic versioning.

>
> > 2. If not, can it be added, maybe with an option?
>
> Highly unlikely, the use of '-' in semantic versioning is a
> world-breaker in dpkg/rpm land already.
>

Ok, I understand that the hyphen from semantic versions could not show
up in the actual package names.

Would it then be possible to accept semantic version compatible version
strings in RPM spec files and transform these versions to RPM
compatible versions? E.g. semantic version "1.2.3-beta.1+build.987"
would become RPM version "1.2.3~beta.1".

Andy



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