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Request for deletation of PPA

Asked by Michael Casadevall

the xubuntu-dev PPA got two bad uploads with a malformed version string which has resisted any upload to override it. Can this PPA's packages be completely removed so proper versions can be uploaded?

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Celso Providelo (cprov) said : 		#1

The problematic version is '4.5.80-0ubuntu1~xfce-beta1'. Using dashes in the version suffix seems to confuse dpkg.

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Michael Bienia (geser) said : 		#2

It depends on how you define confuse: '-' is allowed in upstream versions if there is a debian revision. So "4.5.80-0ubuntu1~xfce-beta1" is parsed as upstream version "4.5.80-0ubuntu1~xfce" and debian revision "beta1".

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Celso Providelo (cprov) said : 		#3

Michael, let's go for the short explanation about what went wrong.

Debian policy [1] allows this version string, but the way it's compared is non-obvious.

The very first thing done is to split on the last hyphen to find upstream and debian version.

In your case we have (4.5.80-0ubuntu1~xfce) (beta1). So, 4.5.80-0ubuntu1 is lower, because it's (4.5.80) (0ubuntu1)

On the other hand, 4.5.80-0ubuntu1-1 is higher, because it's (4.5.80-0ubuntu1) (1) and 4.5.80-0ubuntu1 is higher than 4.5.80-0ubuntu1~xfce

Summing up, this version is policy-compliant, just very much don't do what the uploader expects.

In this case, deleting the packages entirely would be easier and uploading the correct version is the sanest thing to do.

[1] http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-Version

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Celso Providelo (cprov) said : 		#4

Issue sorted in https://edge.launchpad.net/~xubuntu-dev/+archive