Re: Linux 2.6.32-rc3

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Tue, 6 Oct 2009, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > 
> > Unless:
> > 
> > > _That_ i think is a lot harder to confuse with the real .31 than a 
> > > v2.6.31-1234-g16123c4 version string.
> > 
> > .. are you saying that it would be just some automatically generated 
> > thing, just a crippled form of CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO? Kind of a 
> > CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO_SHORTFORM?
> 
> So how about this?
> 
> It changes how CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO works, in the following trivial 
> way:
> 
>  - if it is set, things work the way they always have, and you get a 
>    extended kernel release like
> 
> 	2.6.32-rc3-00052-g0eca52a-dirty
> 
>  - but if it is _not_ set, we'll still try to get a version from the 
>    underlying SCM (we actually support git, hg and SVN right now, even if 
>    some comments may say "git only"), and if the underlying SCM says it 
>    has a local version, we append just "+", so you get a version number 
>    like
> 
> 	2.6.32-rc3+
> 
> IOW, you'd never get 2.6.32-rc0, but you'd get either the complex git 
> version number (or SVN/hg/whatever), or at least "2.6.31+" with the "+" 
> showing that it is more than plain 2.6.31.
> 
> The "+" could be anything else, of course. The diff is pretty obvious, 
> you can argue about exactly _what_ you'd like to see as a suffix for 
> "and then some".

Could we, for consistency's sake, make it:

 	2.6.32-rc3+00052-g0eca52a-dirty
 	2.6.32-rc3+

? Or do we want to keep the old version string alone for some reason?

The reason is that i have been confused in the past by having seen 
something like:

      2.6.29-00052-g0eca52a-dirty

and parsing out (in an admittedly weak moment) the gibberish after the 
first dash. Had it said:

      2.6.29+00052-g0eca52a-dirty

i'm sure i'd have noticed that it's not vanilla v2.6.29 - that plus sign 
stands out like a lightning rod.

	Ingo