> LSB has chosen to leave "upgrade" UNSPECIFIED,
> and has also chose in the "Berlin API" to ignore the
> fact that both dpkg/rpm versions are a triple of
> Epoch/Version/Release.
> 
> Pretending that a "version" string can be anything, opaquely handled,
> including E:V-R, or something else, misses the
> issue that "upgrade" based on "version" is undecidable
> until "version" is well formed, and a collate sequence
> is defined for "upgrade" comparison.

the absence of any description of what "version" means
is a bug in LSB, whether or not that issue is picked
up by the Berlin proposal.  upgrade is a little dicier
in the LSB sense, as it seems different packaging systems
may do quite different things here. Responding to that
by pretending upgrades don't exist is the cowardly 
approach, I know...