Re: [Xen-devel] (release) versioning

[George Dunlap <dunlapg@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, May 5, 2015 at 4:54 PM, Jan Beulich <JBeulich@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> All,
>
> on the hackathon we also discussed possibly changing the versioning
> of Xen. The main rationale for the proposal is that (just like in many
> other software projects) version numbers (in particular the major
> one) currently don't really convey much information. The proposal is
> to take gcc's new versioning scheme as a basis (i.e. I'm not going to
> claim that the below is an exact copy of theirs): Major releases
> always increment the major version number. Minor version 0 is
> reserved to the development cycle, i.e. the first release in any
> release series would be 5.1.0. RCs would be expressed through the
> 3rd digit, i.e. the first RC of the currently being worked on release
> would be 5.0.1 (there was some debate as to whether, despite
> being redundant, to attach -rc1 to it to make clear this is not an
> actual release).
>
> So comparing current and new schemes things would go
>
>         OLD                     NEW
>         4.6-unstable            5.0-unstable (or 5.0.0)
>         4.6.0-rc1                       5.0.1 (-rc1)
>         ...                     ...
>         4.6.0-rcN                       5.0.N (-rcN)
>         4.6.0                   5.1.0
>         4.6.1-rc1                       5.1.1 (-rc1)
>         ...                     ...
>         4.6.1                   5.2.0

I just noticed something a bit strange about this scheme: When the
second digit is '0', it means "development" and non-zero it means
"release"; but when the third digit is zero, it means "release", and
non-zero it means "development" (or "rc").

I guess there's not really a way to get around that.  In any case, I'm
fine with having a little bit of quirkiness.  Having just "-rc" rather
than "-rcN" as a tag sounds fine to me.

Regarding 5.3.0.1 -- now once again you have a 4th digit where
non-zero means "release"; and do we need RCs for this?  Do we have
5.3.0.0.1-rc, and then 5,3,0.1 which is stable?

Personally I agree with David's taste in bike shed color -- I think if
we find a major problem with 5.3.0, we should just release 5.4.0
shortly afterwards.  But this will presumably happen so rarely it
won't really matter all that much (particularly now that we have much
more thorough testing before a release).

So how do we officially decide on this?  Do we wait for 2 weeks on
this thread for objections, then do a formal proposal?

 -George

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