DEP14 policy for two dots

[Nish Aravamudan]

On 03.11.2016 [19:37:41 +0000], Ian Jackson wrote:
> Nish Aravamudan writes ("DEP14 policy for two dots"):
> > [ Raphael, apologies for sending twice, had a error in the headers in
> > the prior one ]
> > 
> > Not sure exactly where to ask this better than debian-devel, but I am
> > working on an importer for the Ubuntu Server team which parses published
> > versions of source packages in Debian and Ubuntu. I ran into an issue
> > today where there is a published version of src:pcre3 with version
> > '8.30..2'. `man git-check-ref-format` says that reference names "cannot
> > have two consecutive dots ..  anywhere." DEP14 specifies appropriate
> > substitutions for : and ~, but it seems like .. should also be accounted
> > for so I can correctly tag historic versions?
> 
> Urk.  How exciting.  I think we may need a more general escaping
> scheme for these and other weirdnesses.
> 
> I have an interest as dgit uses DEP-14 tag escaping.  I have CC'd the
> vcs-pkg list.

Thank you, I should have thought of that!

> tl;dr: I think we should insert `#' characters as needed.

Thank you as well for your excellent analysis of the options. I think
the proposal 

>    Proposed rule:
> 
>    Insert "#":
>       - between each pair of adjacent dots
>       - after any trailing dot
>       - before any leading dot
> 
>    Examples:
>         8.30..2 => 8.30.#.2
>         8.30.   => 8.30.#
>         .42     => #.42

is very reasonable and I assume could be added to DEP14 itself?
Presuming broader agreement, of course. For the purpose of 'ubuntu/'
tagging in our tool, we would adopt the same rule.

Thank,s
Nish

-- 
Nishanth Aravamudan
Ubuntu Server
Canonical Ltd