[Rd] Round trip between package_version and character

[Charles Plessy]

Le Sat, Jan 17, 2026 at 11:02:12AM -0800, Josiah Parry a écrit :
>It would be really nice if the full semantic versioning spec was supported
>in R. I can understand why only major.minor.patch would be supported for
>CRAN. But for an R package in a development stage, it would be wonderful to
>support pre-release and build metadata.
>
>Use of `-` in semver to determine pre-release:
>https://semver.org/#spec-item-9

In Debian we have long handled this use‑case by using a tilde (~) in
version strings—well before semver was formalized. If you like the
semantics of pre‑release identifiers but want to avoid changing the
meaning of - in existing R versioning, adopting ~ might be a practical
alternative.

Relevant documentation:
https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#version

Have a nice week-end,

Charles Plessy