From maintainers-request at octave dot org Thu Mar 23 19:37:00 2006
Subject: Re: comparing version numbers
From: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Cc: octave maintainers mailing list <maintainers at octave dot org>
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 20:35:38 -0500


On Mar 23, 2006, at 5:22 PM, John W. Eaton wrote:

> I changed the version number in CVS earlier today to be 2.9.5+ and the
> following test from cell2mat.m is now failing:
>
>   %!test
>   %! if ([1e6,1e4,1] * str2num (split (version, '.')) > 2010064)
>   %!   assert (cell2mat (D), F);  % crashes octave 2.1.64
>   %! endif
>
> Do we really need the version number test here?
>
> If there is a need to compare version numbers, then perhaps we should
> have a function to do it that can handle things like 2.9.5+ or
> 2.9.5+SVN-serial-number (or similar).
>
> Comments?

When deploying software which depends on Octave I do not
want to force people to upgrade.  In order to support
older versions there will sometimes be a need to compare
version numbers.  Alois' NaN and TSA packages in
octave-forge/extra are designed to support multiple versions
of octave and matlab if you want a real world example of the
sort of tests that are needed.*

- Paul