Wolfgang Denk a écrit :
Hello,
I would like to get your general opinion about changing the U-Boot version numbering scheme.
To be honest, I never really understood myself how this is supposed to work and if the next version should be 1.3.4 or 1.4.0 or 2.0.0, i. e. which changes / additions are important enough to increment the PATCHLEVEL or even VERSION number.
I therefor suggest to drop this style of version numbering and change to a timestamp based version number system which has been quite successfully used by other projects (like Ubuntu) or is under discussion (for Linux).
My suggestion for the new version numbers is as follows:
VERSION = 1 (at least for the time being)
PATCHLEVEL = current year - 2000
SUBLEVEL = current month
Both PATCHLEVEL and SUBLEVEL shall always be 2 digits (at least for the next 91+ years to come) so listings for example on an FTP server shall be in a sane sorting order.
If we accept this system, the next release which probably comes out in October 2008 would be v1.08.10, and assuming the one after that comes out in January 2009 would be named v1.09.01
Comments?
A minor :) issue I can see is that there might be *some* confusion because of an apparent, numerical rollback from 1.3.4 back to 1.08.xx. You're bound to encounter some folks who will ask, again and again, why you're working on 1.02.yy when 1.3.4 is out there.
Now an obvious solution would be to use 2 as the major number. If you're serious about not knowing when a major number bump-up is required, then you should be fairly ok with starting at 2.08.01 rather than 1.08.01. :)
Joke aside: you'll get questions *anyway*, and the scheme is as fine to me as it it.
Another, maybe trickier, issue is: you won't be able to cleanly number interim releases if you encounter a really serious bug right after you've produced this month's release, will you?
Amicalement,