Re: GEP-4 : Versioning and branching rules proposal

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Thu, Sep 26, 2002 at 06:54:07PM +0100, Michael Meeks wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-09-25 at 15:47, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> > 1) a versioning scheme that can will support gnome version & package
> >    version in all the phases of a release.
> > 
> > 2) not bumping things with no apparant change
> > 
> > In my opinion (1) is more important.  Indeed there is some change
> > in a package when its version gets bumped to .0 for a release even
> > though its code has not changed.  That bump indicates that it has
> > been tested with its new sibling packages (the rest of gnome).
> 
> 	Of course, however - from what I remember of the proposal, there were
> even more versions, and they changed even more frequently than most
> people release packages [ with minor fixes ] currently.

The GEP proposes that each new platform beta and release candidate will
require a new library release with the macro version number changed.
That does seem a little excessive when a library is basically stable
(and I tend to agree with Michael's comment that it leaves people
wondering what has changed. The ChangeLog will only say "released new
version", after all).

A general comment on this GEP: in theory, the discussion period closes
today (or tomorrow for people in far away places). However, there are a
number of unresolved issues in section four of the GEP. Some hint about
how the owner (or responsible people) would like to resolve those might
be nice.

My general feeling is that everybody agrees branching guidelines are
good and module versioning guidelines are probably good. But we don't
seem to have nailed down the versioning guidelines very well (the
branching portion doesn't seem very contentious).

Cheers,
Malcolm