Hi, Axel Beckert: > To demonstrate my point, please sort the following version numbers in > your head: > > * 20110111.0
So? It's obviously a date, and there's no reason to suspect it to be in YDM form or something even more horrible. > And now compare the same dates, but written with punctuation: > > * 2011.01.11.0 Wrong punctuation. ISO says to use hyphens and this is what I expect in a YMD date. Dates with periods in them are supposed to be DMY in Germany and (most likely) other countries. (Along the same lines, I expect anything of the form XX/YY/ZZ to be a M/D/Y date until proven wrong because 99% of US dates are written that way.) Also, this form does not parse as well, visually, since there's no clear distinction between "date" and "not part of the date". I know that we can't use hyphens in native packages, but frankly I regard the existence of native packages to be a bug in itself -- even debian-only code (or documentation) has a "content" part and a "these bits only exist in order to build a binary package" part. Also, yyyy-mm-dd-vv also doesn't have much of a visual distinction between the date and the packaging version, so that's not optimal either. -- -- Matthias Urlichs
