0.6.0.beta5 > 0.6

I've always wondered how package managers like yum and apt determines the latest version of a package.

Inside me I've hoped that they used an alternative version name, which simply adds one up for every small update, but most of the time it works, so you don't care.

Yesterday when we released PyChess 0.6, I noticed that after installing it, yum updated it back to 0.6.0.beta5. I didn't really think much about it before the debian packager, Varun Hiremath, noticed me about the problem: 0.6.0.beta5 is considered newer than 0.6.. Sigh.

Now I didn't want to call the new version 0.6.1, so we decided to call it 0.6.0.final, what worked.

Now I just fear how similar problems could totally crash a system, if you use packages from multiple sources..