On Mon, 2004-12-20 at 02:17 -0500, Michael Jennings wrote: > On Saturday, 18 December 2004, at 06:26:26 (-0800), > Rick Graves wrote: > > > Compare: > > > > httpd-2.0.46-44.ent.centos.1.i386.rpm > > httpd-2.0.46-44.ent.centos.2.i386.rpm > > > > By "non-contiguous", I meant that the "1" and "2" digits are > > separated from the main version number, 2.0.46-44. > > The version number is actually "2.0.46," and the release is > "44.ent.centos.1". If your code isn't catching that, it's not doing > the comparison right. > > I have some perl code and some C code that does pretty reliable > version comparisons, in some cases better than rpm does. How can it do it better than rpm? Either it's the same as rpm or it's wrong. any other version comparison result is incorrect. > Let me know > if you're interested. But the basic idea is to split the version and > release into numeric and non-numeric portions and compare each one in > turn. It's not a straight string compare; if it were, 2.0.46 would > seem to be a higher version than 2.0.127. Numbers are compared > numerically for that reason. So the comparison becomes this: > > 2 . 0 . 46 44 .ent.centos. 1 > 2 . 0 . 46 44 .ent.centos. 2 > > Clearly, 1 < 2, so the latter is the newer package. just use the python modules. They link in directly to the rpmlib and use its version comparison functions. -sv