autoupdater: Firmware version 1.7.0 not considered newer than 1.7.0~rc1

[RalfJung]

It used to be the case that (following Debian's handling of version numbers) firmware version 1.7.0 was considered newer than 1.7.0~rc1. However, with the latest gluon 2018.1.3, that does not seem to work any more: We have rolled out 1.7.0~rc1 on our beta branch, and now we built 1.7.0, but even when doing a force update check the autoupdater just says "No new firmware available."

[mweinelt]

The expectation is that anything is greater than anything~ and that holds true for dpkg. Like this:

# 1.7.0 greater than 1.7.0~rc1
$ dpkg --compare-versions 1.7.0 gt 1.7.0~rc1; echo $?
0
# 1.7.0 not less than 1.7.0~rc1
$ dpkg --compare-versions 1.7.0 lt 1.7.0~rc1; echo $?
1
# 1.7.0 not equal 1.7.0~rc1
$ dpkg --compare-versions 1.7.0 eq 1.7.0~rc1; echo $?
1

The code was last changed when the new autoupdater implementation was merged. See 49cb4b3. From a quick glance ~ still seems to have priority: 49cb4b3#diff-1eb735fe6ae57d88007bd5d48cdbb954R38

[RalfJung]

The expectation is that anything is greater than anything~ and that holds true for dpkg. Like this:

Exactly. But somehow it doesn't seem to work any more in 2018.1.3 (the beta 1.7.0~rc1 and the stable 1.7.0 were both built from that version).

With --force-version, it is happy to install the new version:

# autoupdater -f -b experimental
Retrieving manifest from http://mgmt.saar.freifunk.net/firmware/experimental/sysupgrade/experimental.manifest ...
No new firmware available.
# autoupdater -f -b experimental --force-version
Retrieving manifest from http://mgmt.ffsaar/firmware/experimental/sysupgrade/experimental.manifest ...
Stopping cron...
Stopping haveged...
Stopping micrond...
Stopping sysntpd...
Stopping gluon-radvd...
Stopping uhttpd...

And it's not just one node, I noticed this because a user reported a problem on several of their nodes, and I can see the same on mine.

[neocturne]

While looking at this bug, I found two more in the version compare :) Fixes coming soon...