coreutils: Minus/Hyphen and Colon characters
30.3.1 Minus/Hyphen ‘-’ and Colon ‘:’ characters
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In Debian’s version string syntax the version consists of three parts:
[epoch:]upstream_version[-debian_revision]
The ‘epoch’ and ‘debian_revision’ parts are optional.
Example of such version strings:
60.7.2esr-1~deb9u1
52.9.0esr-1~deb9u1
1:2.3.4-1+b2
327-2
1:1.0.13-3
2:1.19.2-1+deb9u5
If the ‘debian_revision part’ is not present, hyphen characters ‘-’
are not allowed. If epoch is not present, colons ‘:’ are not allowed.
If these parts are present, hyphen and/or colons can appear only once
in valid Debian version strings.
In GNU coreutils, such restrictions are not reasonable (a file name
can have many hyphens, a line of text can have many colons).
As a result, in GNU coreutils hyphens and colons are treated exactly
like all other punctuation characters (i.e., they are sorted after
letters. See Punctuation Characters above).
In Debian, these characters are treated differently than in
coreutils: a version string with hyphen will sort before similar strings
without hyphens.
Compare:
$ touch abb ab-cd
$ ls -v -1
abb
ab-cd
With Debian’s ‘dpkg’ they will be listed as ‘ab-cd’ first and ‘abb’
second.
For further technical details see bug35939
(https://bugs.gnu.org/35939).
Info Catalog
coreutils: Differences from the official Debian Algorithm
coreutils: Additional hard-coded priorities in GNU coreutils' version sort