Re: Version string of package

[Jon Turney <jon.turney@dronecode.org.uk>]

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


In any case, you should be suspicious of using upstream version names of 
this form.  They may expect the 'stable' string to sort against other 
strings based on meaning, rather than alphabetically (e.g. 
'20230113-testing' is considered greater, which is probably not what's 
wanted)