Alistair Crooks wrote:

 >>>'rc' encodes as release candidate, which is -1
 >>
 >>No, not just "-1".  How do you compare "1.rc2" against "1.rc3"?

(snip)

 > Thanks for your suggestion, but I believe you've completely missed
 > the point. If "rc" was encoded to ".0.", then 1.0rc1 would be
 > greater than 1.0. The whole point of making "rc" negative was so
 > that release candidates would sort BEFORE the release.

Anyways, thanks everybody for the help.

Al: the C code helps much :)
though not documented, it's pretty clear!

I think this concludes the debate on version number comparison. The
current algorithm is pretty clever, and easy to implement in any
language (in my case, python).

Cheers,
-- 
Julien T. Letessier
Sun Labs Europe, Meylan, France
julien.letessier@sun.com