Re: [ ACTION-107] Updating version list identifier algorithm

> I can live with the non-negative integers as well, so perhaps we should
> revert to using them?

I strongly disagree with reverting back to non-negative integers.
Using non-negative integers is broken and does not reflect how
versioning is done by a lot of people/software (googling "version
1.01" returns over 1 million results), or with widgets in particular
as can be seen in many examples from Apple's Widget download website
[1] - see the 1.0x version numbers).

Non-negative integers are broken in as far as:

1.0001 == 1.1 == 1.01
1.02 > 1.1  AND 1.009 > 1.1.0.1

Using non-neg ints makes not sense and will only lead to confusion and
versioning issues (as pointed out in the Wikipedia entry on about them
[2]).

My current proposal is based on parsing "version-indentifiers" as
floats (described in detail in [3]), and it's no more complicated than
the non-neg integer solution.  In addition, using my solution
overcomes all the above problems and more use cases that non-neg ints.

Kind regards,
Marcos

[1] http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/top50/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning
[3] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2006/waf/widgets/Overview2.src.html
-- 
Marcos Caceres
http://datadriven.com.au

Received on Tuesday, 18 September 2007 12:26:08 UTC