Some advice I received from a Debian developer (packager) was that it works better when upstream projects refrain from using the hyphen '-' in their version string. The packaging software will consider "1.0-rc1" to be more recent than "1.0" as the packaging system appends '-*' to the end of the upstream version to denote the Debian version. As I understand it, the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM) does (has done?) the same.
The solution is for upstream to use the tilde '~' instead so "1.0~rc1" is evaluated as older than "1.0". I follow this rule in the version string I give AC_INIT on my projects and do nothing else with the version string in Autotools. So far it has worked very well. - Nate -- "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true." Ham radio, Linux, bikes, and more: http://www.n0nb.us
