Should reject uploads with equivalent versions

[William Grant]

Some dpkg versions are equal, despite being different strings. In particular, an absent numeric part at the end of a version is counted as 0, so 1.0~foo and 1.0~foo0 are equal. Launchpad will currently accept both, and then be non-deterministic and confusing when dominating. We should probably reject the second upload.

[Julian Edwards (julian-edwards)]

Hmm, we use apt_pkg to do this comparison. Is the bug there or are you looking at something else?

[William Grant (wgrant)]

apt_pkg is correct, and we use it reasonably correctly. Except for this bit here:

    def _checkVersion(self, proposed_version, archive_version, filename):
        """Check if the proposed version is higher than the one in archive."""
        if apt_pkg.VersionCompare(proposed_version, archive_version) < 0:
            self.reject("%s: Version older than that in the archive. %s <= %s"
                        % (filename, proposed_version, archive_version))

If the versions are equal, it will return 0 and the check will pass. An upload with the same version string will be rejected in the file conflict check, but an upload with an equal (but not byte-identical) version string will be let through.

[Julian Edwards (julian-edwards)]

Yay :(

[Robert Collins (lifeless)]

So, <= 0 ?

[William Grant (wgrant)]

Yes. Except that we probably want to do something similar for copies, which currently have no version ratcheting at all.

[Jelmer Vernooij (jelmer)]

Should this sort of check really be on NascentUpload? It seems like Archive would be more appropriate. Or perhaps some new base class that's shared between NascentUpload, the package copier and (eventually) gina?

[William Grant (wgrant)]

Right, I argued a while ago that most of NascentUpload and CopyChecker should be merged. But that will never happen now.

[Julian Edwards (julian-edwards)]

Never say never.