Re: Automake release

[Tom Tromey]

>>>>> "Gary" == Gary V Vaughan <address@hidden> writes:

Gary> But it does raise the general problem of how to differentiate
Gary> between alpha releases and full releases when using a fork
Gary> identifier.

I think `1.5a-myversion' is an alpha version according to the rules.

As I recall, a long time ago the Gnits group decided that we simply
wouldn't support more than 2 release numbers.  If the current release
is 1.4, then the next one is 1.5.  Unfortunately for us, I didn't want
to do this with automake since I've been saying for a long time "1.5
will do this", "1.5 will do that".  Bleah, my bad.

The fork identifier stuff is just so that people who make their own
version of automake, which happens depressingly often, can somehow
mark it without intefering with a Makefile.am where a version number
is in AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS.

In all this is an ugly situation.  I'm thinking of hacking automake to
recognize that `1.4-p<N>' is between 1.4 and 1.5 (so that
AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS=1.4-p1 will work ok when 1.5 is used).

In the future I'll be more careful about how I talk about the next
release, and about release processes in general.  For instance the
release after 1.5 -- whether it is a major feature release or a simple
bug fix release -- will be named 1.6.

Tom