oops ... did not see that
i downloaded energia-1.6.10E18 and it has the issue (appears to be the latest release) ... using win7-64
after doing research on the web for a couple of hours, i determined that the minus sign was causing the issue
i started this post because of the package_index.json being signed
it appears that the package_index.json.sig file is generated using gpg and a private key (as per
this: https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/pull/4457 )
so is there any way to get an updated package_index.json and package_index.json.sig file to go with it ?
changing o