rocky/rpms — comment on commit 84ad492450de5d34a89356189ea0c75884966270
File: specs/bashdb/bashdb.spec line 6
By rocky:

The inconsistency between names between bashdb and remake and the use of the + is a result of how two different Debian packagers decided to name the respective packages in Debian. See http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/bashdb versus http://packages.debian.org/wheezy/remake.

Packaging of course came after the releases. But in the case of remake they went pretty much together. Yaroslav (Yarik) had agonized over the naming for remake and came up with + as the separator. For bashdb, Oleksandr (Alek) decided to turn the _ into a dot.

Since it doesn't matter that much to me, I have been following Yarik's proposal subsequently on remake releases. For bashdb, I prefer something other than '.' to separate the two fields.

That said, if you want 4.2 as the version and 0.8 (not 1.0.8) as the release, that make sense too. Especially as _ is not supposed to be used as a separator.