dash versus dot

[Jeff A. Earickson]

Julian,
   I have to agree with Robin on this one.  The dash has always
bugged me because my fingers find the period (er, "full stop")
easier than that dash on the top row.  Plus, all other UNIX
software seems to use the "major.minor.teeny" syntax.  I just
figured the dash was a UK quirk and never said anything about it...

Jeff Earickson
Colby College

On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Robin M. wrote:

> Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2004 12:59:08 -0500
> From: Robin M. <robin at PRIMUS.CA>
> Reply-To: MailScanner mailing list <MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK>
> To: MAILSCANNER at JISCMAIL.AC.UK
> Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: Unstable release 4.26-4 released
>
> On Fri, 9 Jan 2004, Michele Neylon :: Blacknight Solutions wrote:
> >
> > > > please if you see fit change the naming scheme to the standard.
> > >
> > > Whose/which standard?
> > >
> > > > 4.26.4 instead of 4.26-4
> > >
> > > Personally I prefer the latter because it more clearly suggests
> > > release 4 of
> > > version 4.26, whereas the former doesn't really indicate whether it's an
> > > interim release or just the next one in the series.
> > >
> >
> > I like the current way Julian names the versions. It makes it easy for me to
> > keep track.
> >
> Another reason for changing it is that there are currently two delimiters
> for identifying the version, ( the . and the - ) when most other software
> simply uses each field as an identifier and only uses one delimeter ( the
> . ) to separate the version identifiers.
>
> i.e
> openssh-3.2.3p1.tar.gz
> apache-1.3.28.tar.gz
> mysql-4.0.17.tar.gz
> php-4.3.4.tar.bz2
>
> here is an example of software using a dash delimiter but this is for a
> patch level
> exim-patch-3.34-3.35.gz
>
> here is another example of how a dash is used for delimiting but this is
> to specify a cvs snapshot where the date is after the dash.
> postfix-2.0.16-20031231.tar.gz
> and here is the stable release
> postfix-2.0.16.tar.gz
>
> And here is an example of how the dash is used to delimit a release
> candidate.
> Mail-SpamAssassin-2.60-rc5.zip
>
> All of the aformentioned software conforms to the standards when building
> rpms but MailScanner does not.
>
> MailScanner clearly goes against the versioning scheme
> MailScanner-4.25-14.tar.gz
>