Re: Problems with gnits standard and git-version-gen

[Nate Bargmann]

Some advice I received from a Debian developer (packager) was that it
works better when upstream projects refrain from using the hyphen '-' in
their version string.  The packaging software will consider "1.0-rc1" to
be more recent than "1.0" as the packaging system appends '-*' to the
end of the upstream version to denote the Debian version.  As I
understand it, the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) does (has done?) the
same.

The solution is for upstream to use the tilde '~' instead so "1.0~rc1"
is evaluated as older than "1.0".

I follow this rule in the version string I give AC_INIT on my projects
and do nothing else with the version string in Autotools.  So far it has
worked very well.

- Nate

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