base-4.3.1.0: Basic libraries

Portability | non-portable (local universal quantification in ReadP)
Stability | experimental
Maintainer | libraries@haskell.org

Data.Version

Contents

- The `Version` type
- A concrete representation of `Version`

Description

A general library for representation and manipulation of versions.

Versioning schemes are many and varied, so the version representation provided by this library is intended to be a compromise between complete generality, where almost no common functionality could reasonably be provided, and fixing a particular versioning scheme, which would probably be too restrictive.

So the approach taken here is to provide a representation which subsumes many of the versioning schemes commonly in use, and we provide implementations of `Eq`, `Ord` and conversion to/from `String` which will be appropriate for some applications, but not all.

Synopsis

- data Version = Version {
  - versionBranch :: [Int]
  - versionTags :: [String]
  }
- showVersion :: Version -> String
- parseVersion :: ReadP Version

# The `Version` type

data Version

A `Version` represents the version of a software entity.

An instance of `Eq` is provided, which implements exact equality modulo reordering of the tags in the `versionTags` field.

An instance of `Ord` is also provided, which gives lexicographic ordering on the `versionBranch` fields (i.e. 2.1 > 2.0, 1.2.3 > 1.2.2, etc.). This is expected to be sufficient for many uses, but note that you may need to use a more specific ordering for your versioning scheme. For example, some versioning schemes may include pre-releases which have tags `"pre1"`, `"pre2"`, and so on, and these would need to be taken into account when determining ordering. In some cases, date ordering may be more appropriate, so the application would have to look for `date` tags in the `versionTags` field and compare those. The bottom line is, don't always assume that `compare` and other `Ord` operations are the right thing for every `Version`.

Similarly, concrete representations of versions may differ. One possible concrete representation is provided (see `showVersion` and `parseVersion`), but depending on the application a different concrete representation may be more appropriate.

Constructors

Version |

Fields

versionBranch :: [Int]

  The numeric branch for this version. This reflects the fact that most software versions are tree-structured; there is a main trunk which is tagged with versions at various points (1,2,3...), and the first branch off the trunk after version 3 is 3.1, the second branch off the trunk after version 3 is 3.2, and so on. The tree can be branched arbitrarily, just by adding more digits.

  We represent the branch as a list of `Int`, so version 3.2.1 becomes [3,2,1]. Lexicographic ordering (i.e. the default instance of `Ord` for `[Int]`) gives the natural ordering of branches.

versionTags :: [String]

  A version can be tagged with an arbitrary list of strings. The interpretation of the list of tags is entirely dependent on the entity that this version applies to.

Instances

Eq Version |
Ord Version |
Read Version |
Show Version |
Typeable Version |

# A concrete representation of `Version`

showVersion :: Version -> String

Provides one possible concrete representation for `Version`. For a version with `versionBranch` `= [1,2,3]` and `versionTags` `= ["tag1","tag2"]`, the output will be `1.2.3-tag1-tag2`.

parseVersion :: ReadP Version

A parser for versions in the format produced by `showVersion`.