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See Releases.
Various releases of a given packages are distinguished by their version numbers. Versions are usually made up by two or three decimal numbers, separated by periods. An officially released package ideally has two numbers, a pretest release often have either three numbers or two numbers immediately suffixed with a small case letter. Versions should be increasing as time goes, for example, acceptable successions might be:
1.0 1.1 1.2 1.2.1 1.2.2 1.2.3 1.2.4 1.3 1.3.1 1.4
or maybe:
... 3.17 3.17a 3.17b 3.17c 3.18
A much simplified statement of the overall goal is that the following recipe should usually work, when one wants to install any GNU package on his Unix systems.
% ftp gnu.org ftp> anonymous ftp> user@fully.qualified.domain ftp> binary ftp> cd pub/gnu ftp> get package-version.tar.gz ftp> bye % tar xfz package-version.tar.gz % cd package-version % cat README % ./configure % make check install
Of course, variations are endless for both maintainers and installers, but a nice goal is trying to prepare things so that the recipe above does something sensible, as stated.