[U-Boot-Users] Release numbering (was Merge Window Closed.)

[Wolfgang Denk]

Hello,

in message <46D588E6.3020209 at smiths-aerospace.com> you wrote:
>
> What about adopting Ubuntu's philosophy and numbering by year and month Y.M?
>    <http://www.ubuntu.com/aboutus/faq>

To be honest: I don't like it. No rational reason, just gut feeling.

> This has the disadvantage of not clearly marking major changes 
> (discontinuities) e.g.   1.x -> 2.0 or 1.2.y -> 1.3.0.  Assuming there 
> are no earth-shattering discontinuities in the future, that isn't a 

There will be such things, I guess... 2.0 is already in a repo...

> 1) It acknowledges that u-boot (as with most open source projects) is 
> subject to continuous rolling improvement.

Oops? I don't see any difference for  this  between  onve  versioning
scheme and any other, as long as the versions change frequently ;-)

> 2) It eliminates the debate of whether the major or just the minor 
> number needs to be rolled.

ACK. But actually this is more a disadvantage - see above.

> 3) When someone says "my build based on version 7.8 is broken" we can 
> scale our scorn based on how old the release is without having to look 
> it up.  ;-)

I never look this up. Anything that is not TOT is "too old" :-)

> 4) This is also in line with Linus's current philosophy that the kernel 
> will be 2.6.xxxxxx forever.  (I suspect this won't hold literally true 
> forever, I predict the "2.6" prefix will eventually be dropped.)

Ummm... but Linux does NOT use da date based version number.

> Going to date-based numbering makes a lot of sense to me.

I feel this is mostly a matter of taste.

I have been using date based labels all  the  time  when  U-Boot  was
still  in CVS (see all the LABEL_200y_mm_dd_HHMM tags we have). And I
must say that I really got sick of this. It served a specific need in
CVS, but I never needed this again in git. If it was not for a public
release process I  wouln't  need  any  version  number  at  all.  But
whatever  we  may use, please not date based stamps. I think they are
*stupid*. JUst my 0.02 EUR.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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