Chapter 5. Control files and their fields

33

The version number has four components: major and minor version number and major and

minor patch level. When the standards change in a way that requires every package to change

the major number will be changed. Significant changes that will require work in many pack 

ages will be signaled by a change to the minor number. The major patch level will be changed

for any change to the meaning of the standards, however small; the minor patch level will be

changed when only cosmetic, typographical or other edits are made which neither change the

meaning of the document nor affect the contents of packages.

Thus only the first three components of the policy version are significant in the Standards 

Version control field, and so either these three components or the all four components may be

specified.

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5.6.12

Version

The version number of a package. The format is: [epoch

:

]upstream_version[

debian_revision]

The three components here are:

epoch This is a single (generally small) unsigned integer. It may be omitted, in which case zero

is assumed. If it is omitted then the upstream_version may not contain any colons.

It is provided to allow mistakes in the version numbers of older versions of a package,

and also a package's previous version numbering schemes, to be left behind.

upstream_version This is the main part of the version number. It is usually the version number

of the original ( upstream ) package from which the

.deb

file has been made, if this is

applicable. Usually this will be in the same format as that specified by the upstream

author(s); however, it may need to be reformatted to fit into the package management

system's format and comparison scheme.

The comparison behavior of the package management system with respect to the up 

stream_version is described below. The upstream_version portion of the version number is

mandatory.

The upstream_version may contain only alphanumerics

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and the characters

. +   :

(full

stop, plus, hyphen, colon) and should start with a digit. If there is no debian_revision then

hyphens are not allowed; if there is no epoch then colons are not allowed.

debian_revision This part of the version number specifies the version of the Debian package

based on the upstream version. It may contain only alphanumerics and the characters

+

and

.

(plus and full stop) and is compared in the same way as the upstream_version is.

It is optional; if it isn't present then the upstream_version may not contain a hyphen. This

format represents the case where a piece of software was written specifically to be turned

6

In the past, people specified the full version number in the Standards Version field, for example  2.3.0.0 .

Since minor patch level changes don't introduce new policy, it was thought it would be better to relax policy and

only require the first 3 components to be specified, in this example  2.3.0 . All four components may still be used

if someone wishes to do so.

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Alphanumerics are

A Za z0 9

only.