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versions

Introduction

This extension provides procedures for handling versioning of arbitrary packages. It should simplify determining when new packages are available based on some string containing version data. This should, hopefully, make life easier for maintainers.

Version Strings

Version strings have the following format:

[LABEL][MAJOR][MINOR][MICRO][PATCH][EXTRA]

MAJOR, MINOR, MICRO (if given), and all segments of PATCH (if given) must be separated by dots (.). The version strings have the following semantics:

[any chars]

Segment	Required?	Format	Description
LABEL	no	[any chars]	Any characters, including digits, are allowed. If the LABEL ends with a digit character, some separator character BESIDES . is required; otherwise, the end of LABEL will be parsed as the MAJOR value. The LABEL segment usually corresponds to the name of the package.
MAJOR	yes	[integer]	Major release version.
MINOR	yes	[integer]	Minor release version.
MICRO	no	[integer]	Micro release version.
PATCH	no	([integer])...	Patch version. This may be composed of any number of segments; there is no limit. (This is to allow parsing of version control tree versions.)
EXTRA	no		Extra version suffix, usually for local or maintainer versions. It must be separated from the final element by a non-digit, non-dot character.