How to compare two package version numbers

Question

I'm writing a script in PHP that needs to compare two package version numbers to determine which is newer.

PHP has a handy function called version_compare(), but it gets really confused with some of the more creative version numbers. For example, version_compare() thinks that 0.9.8g-16ubuntu3.1 is newer than 0.9.8o-1ubuntu4.4.

Anyone know how I can get this to work?

I'm happy to run any command line scripts using exec().

Answer 1

take a look to the dpkg --compare-versions option, it will allow you to ask dpkg to do the comparison :)

dpkg --compare-versions 0.9.8g-16ubuntu3.1 lt 0.9.8o-1ubuntu4.4

will return 0, that means 0.9.8g-16ubuntu3.1 is lt (lesser than, < ) to 0.9.8o-1ubuntu4.4