@dan that's fine. If you read my suggestions in https://github.com/opscode/omnibus-ruby/issues/134#issuecomment-39961286 you will see I suggest separating input and output formats. So you could say parse a Rubygems pre-release of `1.0.0.rc.1` from the Chef component and output a SemVer compliant version of `1.0.0-rc.1` in the omnibus package name. This is one of the core features of mixlib-versioning.