On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 11:14 AM, Simon Urbanek
<simon.urbanek@r-project.org>wrote:
[...]

>
> That's not what it means in R - the number after the dash *is* the patch
> level. The point is that the semantics of the dash are different in the two
> standards and so is the interpretation of the components. That's why I said
> earlier (in the part that you cut out) that probably the only viable option
> is to enhance the R handling to add some handling of non-integer components.
>

Well, it is the patch level, or it is not, I am sure that for some people
it is, for some it is not, and for many of them it is missing completely. I
don't think it is possible to enforce the same semantics of the version
numbers on thousands of package maintainers. Of course it is sensible to
have some recommendation, Writing R extensions does not say anything about
semantics right now. But this is kind of a side issue for me.

Adding non-integer components, and defining an ordering for them is exactly
what I was after. Maybe referring to semver.org was a mistake by me, I
looked around for some standard versioining that is already used by some
projects, and it seemed sensible.

[...]

> Updating compareVersion() is the least problem - tools that handle package
> files often use regexps which will fail once non-intergers are allowed.
>

OK, this is probably a blocker. Thanks for the discussion, anyway.

Best,
Gabor

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