Re: Version string of package

[Adam Dinwoodie <adam@dinwoodie.org>]

On Fri, Jan 13, 2023 at 01:22:44PM +0000, Jon Turney via Cygwin-apps wrote:
> On 13/01/2023 11:52, Takashi Yano via Cygwin-apps wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Is it allowed to include '-' in version string (e.g. '20230113-stable')?
> > I'm asking because mksetupini warns:
> > 
> > mksetupini: file 'xxx.tar.xz' in package yyy contains '-' in version
> > 
> > though it works as expected.
> 
> Short answer:
> 
> It's a bug that this isn't a fatal error.  Please don't do it!
> 
> Long answer:
> 
> Package naming in Cygwin has a long and tangled history. This isn't
> explicitly precluded by the rules at [1], but probably should be.
> 
> (Fedora, which we generally follow for packaging rules, now doesn't allow
> '-' in versions, just digits, letters and '.')
> 
> We need to be able to unambiguously separate a NVR string into the package
> name, version and release.
> 
> Underscores are allowed in package names, so the simple approach of
> splitting on the rightmost two hyphens would work, if we don't allow
> exceptions like this.
> 
> (We can get it right in this case, because we have a piece of extra
> information: the directory the package is in, which happens to always be
> named N in the current scheme of things, but we might want to change that)
> 
> [1] https://cygwin.com/packaging-package-files.html

I just spotted [0] in the Cygport documentation, and was reminded of
this conversation.  According to that, the version string is explicitly
allowed to include hyphens!  I suspect that's fundamentally a
documentanion bug these days, and should just be expunged...

[0]: https://cygwin.github.io/cygport/syntax_cygpart.html#VERSION

Quick patch below; I can submit this properly as a GitHub PR or with
`git send-email` or otherwise if that'd be useful...

diff --git a/lib/syntax.cygpart b/lib/syntax.cygpart
index 4a400a71..6b992031 100644
--- a/lib/syntax.cygpart
+++ b/lib/syntax.cygpart
@@ -316,7 +316,7 @@ __target_is_embedded() {
 #****v* Globals/VERSION
 #  DESCRIPTION
 #  The upstream package version number.  PV must begin with a digit 0-9, and
-#  subsequent characters can be a digit, letter, dot, hyphen, or underscore.
+#  subsequent characters can be a digit, letter, dot, or underscore.
 #****
 #****v* Globals/RELEASE
 #  DESCRIPTION