Debian RC versions appear more recent than released versions

apt-get does an alphanumeric comparison, so 8.3.0-ce appears to be a downgrade of 8.3.0-rc3.ce.0:

$ sudo apt-get install gitlab-ce=8.3.0-ce.0
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be DOWNGRADED:
  gitlab-ce
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 downgraded, 0 to remove and 329 not upgraded.
Need to get 405 MB of archives.
After this operation, 904 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Fetched 405 MB in 19s (21.2 MB/s)
dpkg: warning: downgrading gitlab-ce from 8.3.0-rc3.ce.0 to 8.3.0-ce.0
(Reading database ... 320978 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../gitlab-ce_8.3.0-ce.0_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking gitlab-ce (8.3.0-ce.0) over (8.3.0-rc3.ce.0) ...
Setting up gitlab-ce (8.3.0-ce.0) ...

The Debian version scheme is described here. Note that you cannot count on RPM having support for the Debian-style tilde versioning. Several distributions disable this feature.

I propose the naming scheme be structured in a way that makes the upgrade transparent. For example, this is what Fedora uses:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging%3aNamingGuidelines#NonNumericRelease

I am already aware of all the guidelines but keeping both Debian and Centos guidelines in tune and not breaking everyones upgrade path is not easy to resolve.

A bit of history:

1. Omnibus upgrade to v4 caused our tags with - to be replaced with ~ so we had upgrade failures on Centos, internal issue https://dev.gitlab.org/gitlab/omnibus-gitlab/issues/20
2. Due to 1. , we changed the tags and thus how the versions are created in internal issue https://dev.gitlab.org/gitlab/omnibus-gitlab/issues/21 . This is why we now have 8.3.0-ce.0 like versions
3. We also need to correctly differentiate between same versions but different packages, 8.3.0.ce.0 and 8.3.0.ce.1. Sounds simple but omnibus packagers will behave differently depending on the position of that number in the tag.
4. We have a problem of how to correctly upgrade from RC packages to stable versions without it being reported by package manager that it is a downgrade
5. We have also nightly builds #864 (closed) which are incorrectly versioned(less of a worry)

I've started some work on it but it takes a lot of time so it constantly gets delayed. As a first step we should document it and there is an issue for that in gitlab-org/gitlab-ce#2331.

@marin Thanks for commenting.

mentioned in merge request !578 (closed)

In !578 (closed) you can see the stuff I did as a part of the effort to make the packages build fully automated, it also touches on the packages versions subject with the nightly builds.

Added release label

mentioned in issue gitlab-com/operations#154 (closed)

mentioned in issue #1879 (closed)