Tesseract packages do not respect the debian package name policy and "invent" a release number that does not exist

[Sergio Callegari]

Ubuntu currently packages tesseract at the following versions:

3.03.02-3 - Trusty
3.03.03-1 - Utopic
3.03.03-1 - Vivid

According to the debian policy manual, this indicates an upstream version at 3.03.02 or at 3.03.03.

However, none of these upstream versions has ever been released.

Upstream is at 3.03RC1 (shipped Feb4 2014). This is the last upstream version after 3.02.02 (shipped oct 23 2012).
This has been confirmed in https://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/issues/detail?id=1424

Weirdly enough the debian changelogs for the package mention "new upstream releases" that according to the tesseract developers never happened.

Unfortunately, this situation makes it very hard to track bugs against the upstream versions. Even worse, they make the user think that the currently shipped package in utopic and vivid is stable (the third minor update to 3.03) when in fact it is an RC.

According to the policy, the packages should have versions like

3.03~RC1+<something>-<ubuntu_revision>

Where <ubuntu_revision> is something like "1", "2", etc and <something> is something that lets one understand that the package is built from a snapshot of the development tree taken after the release of the RC1. For instance

3.03~RC1+140907-git49C278

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 14.10
Package: tesseract-ocr 3.03.03-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.16.0-30.40-generic 3.16.7-ckt3
Uname: Linux 3.16.0-30-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.14.7-0ubuntu8.2
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: KDE
Date: Fri Feb 20 10:48:38 2015
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-12-12 (434 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" - Release amd64 (20131016.1)
SourcePackage: tesseract
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to utopic on 2014-10-30 (112 days ago)

[Jeff Breidenbach (jeff-jab)]

There is a long story here, but I won't bore you with it. Resolved as of 3.04.00 which is an official upstream release.