Re: GEP-4 : Versioning and branching rules proposal

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Michael Meeks <michael ximian com> writes:

> Hi Frederic,
> 
> On Fri, 2002-08-30 at 11:18, Frederic Crozat wrote:
> > Here is the announce for GEP-4 : versioning and branching rules for
> > GNOME modules..
> > 
> > Discussions should be done on desktop-devel list..
> > 
> > Grr, this time, I'll use the correct email for desktop-devel list.. 
> 
> 	It concerns me on re-re-reading this; that the proposal (as is common
> it seems) fails to make sufficient work of codifying the requirements as
> distinct from handing down a solution.
> 
> 	While the solution you present sounds attractive, it would I believe be
> far more helpful to state the requirements, so that we can see if these
> are acceptable to eg. the Gtk+ team - and present the solution you
> propose as more of a flexible suggestion to meet those requirements -
> than a handed down solution.

[...]

> 	etc. ;-) sorry that it's lots harder to extract the essentials in that
> fashion; but I believe it'll be rewarding in the long run. Also, I must
> confess to being most interested in what Owen thinks of this - and
> perhaps we should add him to the responsible maintainers, since his
> input is so critical to getting something uniform across as many
> packages as possible.

GTK+ simply can't use these rules, because GTK+ versioning won't
always correspond to GNOME versioning.... it more-or-less does right
now. But that's coincidence.

(Also, we would have a hard time changing practices that we've
followed consistently for 5 years now)

But I don't that invalidates the idea of having a set of common rules;
though perhaps "guidelines" would be a better term.

Just because GTK+ is still going to be branching as gtk-2-4 and
releasing tarballs named gtk+-2.4.1, gtk+-2.4.2, ...  doesn't mean
that we should have gnome-applets branched as Gnome-2-6 and
gnome-desktop branched as GNOME-2-6, with versoin 2.6.0.3 of one and
and 2.6.1.0 of the other coming out for GNOME-2.6.1.

That is, what is approximately the same is best to be exactly the
same; but it doesn't necessarily make sense for all the modules we
ship with GNOME to have even approximately the same guidelines.

Regards,
                                        Owen