[Mongrel] The Debian Plan - reloaded

[Chad Woolley]

On 1/12/07, Filipe <filipe at icewall.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 12 Jan 2007, Zed A. Shaw wrote:
> >> * When release candidates are released, can you append something like
> >> "~rc1" to the tar file? This help debian auto tools to check new
> >> releases.
> >
> > There's also a problem with how Rake and/or rubygems likes its version numbers.  It won't accept ~rc1 style endings for various design reasons.
>
> Hum... then -rc1? :D Well, I take a look at this when generating the rake
> task.

I *THINK* this is not the rubygems standard.  See this:

http://rubygems.org/read/chapter/16

I also *THINK* these constraints are due to the way RubyGems allows
specification of variable gem version, for example, "> 0.1.0" or "=
"1.0.1".  If they allowed people to put random character strings in
version numbers that logic couldn't work.

That brings up a couple of questions that I'd like to know the answers to:

1. Why does debian or apt need to distinguish between release
candidates?  Is this automatically tied to -dev packages or something?
2. How are rubygems supposed to indicate release candidates, or beta
or whatever you call something that is pre-release?

-- Chad