On Mon, Mar 31, 2025 at 02:01:23PM -0400, Chris Ross via dovecot wrote:
the -4 comes from our build system.
Regardless where it comes from, "-" is usually used for the package version.
Yes, which is why a build system is attaching it. It’s a build number or version of the package being built. I don’t know the history here, but it sounds like the problem might be that you’re building something and then trying to take the built assets and repackage then with another build system. Normally, the solution is to not build twice. Aki, is the “build system” you mention producing builds, or is it a system that is used to tag sources? Maybe this is what I’m missing.
FWIW, in the Debian packaging world the uscan tool can be configured to
transform the upstream version string as needed to cope with things like
this. For Debian itself, I simply stripped the trailing -4 with the
following change: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/dovecot/-/commit/18c417079ce1df831f860e20ae0...
But yeah, it was a surprise to see it show up, and it did force me to deal with uscan's arcane configuration syntax. It would certainly not upset me if future releases didn't append such a suffic to the version string in the published artifacts.
noah