mojombo/semver — Issue #10: ~ is actually useful
Author: anarcat
Created: 2012-01-07 01:56:18+00:00
State: open

I see that ~ was removed as a separator, but i think it has its uses. It's actually what Debian uses to mark release candidates as being "lower" than the real release. In fact, it makes the whole thing semantically easier to compare.

Consider: a.b.c > a.b, as a general case. If we say that "dot" can separate "release candidates" strings, then this is not true if c is "rc1", for example (1.0.rc1 < 1.0), breaking the general case (for that matter, 1.0.rc1 > 1.0.0).

So I think that ~ serves a purpose and should be brought back in, which would also mean that this would be compatible with the Debian versionning.

For more information about Debian version numbers and the way they are compared, see: http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Version