Editing Software versioning (section)

==History==
File numbers were used especially in public administration, as well as companies, to uniquely identify files or cases. For computer files this practice was introduced for the first time with MIT's ITS file system, later the TENEX filesystem for the PDP-10 in 1972.<ref>[https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220421975_TENEX_a_paged_time_sharing_system_for_the_PDP_-_10 TENEX, a paged time sharing system for the PDP - 10], Bobrow, Burchfiel, Murphy, Tomlinson, March 1972, Communications of the ACM 15(3):135-143.</ref>

Later lists of files including their versions were added, and dependencies amongst them. Linux distributions like Debian, with its [[dpkg]], early on created package management software which could resolve dependencies between their packages. Debian's first try was that a package knew other packages which depended on it. From 1994 on this idea was inverted, so a package that knew the packages it needed. When installing a package, dependency resolution was used to automatically calculate the packages needed as well, and install them with the desired package. To facilitate upgrades, minimum package versions were introduced. Thus the numbering scheme needed to tell which version was newer than the required one.<ref>[https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1994/02/msg00026.html package interdependencies], Robert Sanders, 1994-02-25.</ref><ref>[<https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1995/07/msg00085.html Bug#1167: ELF development packages fail or have missing dependencies], Ian Jackson, 1995-07-30.</ref><ref>[https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/project-history.en.pdf A Brief History of Debian], Javier Fernández-Sanguino et al, 2021-10-26.</ref>