[Sparkle] Sparkle Not Finding Update with Different Style Version Number

[Simone Manganelli]

I'm having a weird problem with Sparkle.  I've made an appcast that's  
been working perfectly up until the latest release of my app.  I've  
been using the convention "1.0b1", "1.0b2", "1.0b3", etc., all the  
way up to "1.0b10", and each previous beta that has Sparkle installed  
has correctly found the newest updates.

However, with the latest version, I changed the version to "1.0rc1",  
and now all the previous betas refuse to find the latest update to my  
app.  They all say that they have the latest version, even though,  
from what I understand, they should simply retrieve the latest entry  
in the appcast, compare the version numbers, and if they're  
different, offer to install the update from the latest entry in the  
appcast.  This doesn't seem to be working.

For what it's worth, I'm using the sparkle:version extension, so, for  
example, my enclosure tags look like:

enclosure sparkle:version="1.0rc1" url="http://homepage.mac.com/simx/ 
mugs/tunetagger1.0rc1.dmg" length="12345" type="application/octet- 
stream"/

(surrounded by angle brackets, of course.)

Curiously, if I change the version number inside the version tag to  
"1.0b11", all the betas immediately see the new update and will  
happily install it.  Why does the version number matter?  I thought  
the version tag was there precisely to eliminate these kinds of  
situations where the update would break based on a different format  
of the version number?

Am I doing something wrong?

-- Simone Manganelli
Ellipsis Productions