Ubuntu 8.04 [LWN.net]

Ubuntu 8.04

Posted May 5, 2008 21:46 UTC (Mon) by seyman (subscriber, #1172)
In reply to: Ubuntu 8.04 by oak
Parent article: Linux Shootout: 7 Desktop Distros Compared (InformationWeek)

> As it's just <year>.<month>, does it really matter whether the month is 
> prefixed with a zero or not (04 and 4 are both April....)?

For some counting methods, 8.4 > 8.10 .
So, yes, some times, it really matters. :-)

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Ubuntu 8.04

Posted May 5, 2008 21:57 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

If you use an approach to version numbers that says that 8.4 > 8.10, you force both RPM-based and .deb-based distributions to use epochs to tell the package manager that 8.4 is newer. So you would be well advised not to do this: don't interpret version numbers as rational numbers, the standard convention is to treat them as sequences of integers, lexicographically sorted.

Ubuntu 8.04

Posted May 6, 2008 2:37 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link]

The problem here is with people rather than computers.  The version numbers look like normal
decimal numbers, and people know that 8.4 is greater than 8.10.

By using 8.04 instead, the ambiguity goes away.

Ubuntu 8.04

Posted May 6, 2008 9:32 UTC (Tue) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]

IMHO the problem is someone defining x.1x > x.2 in the first place...