Hello,

At the Devuan Dev meeting on Thursday 3rd February at 2030 UTC, it was agreed to
change the Devuan package version numbering policy. The Devuan version that is
appended to forked packages will change from '+devuanN' to 'devuanN'. For the
full rationale behind this decision see below.

If you are an end-user you will not need to do anything, but you may notice the
visual change in version numbering.

If you are a developer and maintain any Devuan packages, next time you prepare a
new version by merging a Debian source update, append 'devuan1' (without a '+')
to the Debian version in d/changelog. Existing released packages do not need
changing.

Rationale
=========

The previous practice of appending '+devuanN' causes problems when merging
security and stable updates. When releasing these, Debian appends the string
'+debNNuN' (for example '+deb11u1').

Comparing the existing Devuan version and the Debian update:-

 +deb11u1+devuan1
    |
    | <- 'b' sorts before 'v' and is therefore seen as an earlier version
    |
 +devuan1

But we require the security update to be seen as later than our existing forked
version.

Using the new scheme:-

devuan1
|
| <- 'd' sorts before '+' and is therefore seen as an earlier version
|
+deb11u1devuan1

The full details of Debian's version sorting algorithm can be found in
deb-version(5).

Any questions, please ask.

Mark