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Re: Version numbering


From: Alexandre Duret-Lutz
Subject: Re: Version numbering
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 09:33:29 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.1003 (Gnus v5.10.3) Emacs/21.3 (gnu/linux)

>>> "Daniel" == Daniel Reed <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

 Daniel> Several GNU projects (including GCC) do leave off .0's
 Daniel> for anything past the minor number, so it seems ls -v
 Daniel> can't be the final authority :/

Sorry I meant to compare only the version numbers not the full filename.

Comparing version number is what automatic installation tools
has to do in order to know which version is newer than the
other.  Such tools can deal with 1.2 being older than 1.10, but
they have trouble realizing that 1.3pre2 before 1.3 is know to
break them, because 1.3pre2 is lexically after 1.3.  Debian at
least has a special workaround (the maintainer of a package
add a extra digit in front of the version number) to cope with
such unsortable numbering scheme.

Hence the suggestion of supporting at least `ls -v'.

% ls -v1
1.5
1.5.0a
1.5.0b
1.5.1
1.5a
1.5b
1.6
1.10

Obviously, as long as characters are reserved for beta releases,
we may not care about such installation tools.  After all the
real releases are easy to sort since they use only digit.
As far as explaining the new scheme is concerned, I claim that
it's easier to do if it works with `ls -v'.

In the past, people have also argued that using characters was
making it more difficult for tools to sort the versions.  If you
agree you might as well switch to the blessed FSF way of making
beta releases (using .90, .91, .92, etc.).  Texinfo and
Coreutils switched to it recently.  I don't really like it
because I think it's horrible with branches and is less obvious
than characters (I really like these extra characters).

A scheme which I think would be compatible with Gary's will
(maybe this is what he proposed, I simply did not understand
whether he wanted to jump from 1.7d down to 1.7 or up to 1.8).

    1.6 (release)
    1.7a (CVS), 
    1.7b (beta), 
    1.7c (CVS), 
    1.7d (beta), 
    1.8 (release)
on the branch:
    1.8.1a (CVS)
    1.8.1b (beta)
    1.8.2 (release)

etc.  Keeping odd version for development ensure people cannot
mis-sort versions with letters with others. It could also gives
some feeling of sense to accustomed to the odd/even version
numbering scheme of Linux.
-- 
Alexandre Duret-Lutz





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