Re: [PATCH, v2] kbuild: Improve version string logic

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>]

* David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 13 Oct 2009, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> 
> > > IMHO yes. This change essentially creates a backwards incompatibility with 
> > > existing naming schemes. Requiring to patch the change out to preserve an 
> > > existing naming scheme just seems a tad unfriendly.
> > 
> > Let's keep the old behavior by making the AUTO option an three-way 
> > choice ("none", "short", "auto"), and making sure that it actually 
> > takes work to choose "none" (and that "make oldconfig" doesn't 
> > choose it unless you explicitly made the choice before - so people 
> > who just re-use old .config files wouldn't get "none" by mistake).
> 
> I don't think you want to do that because it would require the .config 
> to be posted on bug reports, for example, to determine the setting of 
> CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO before you can interpret the kernel version.  
> In other words, you wouldn't know that "2.6.32-rc4" is actually 200 
> commits beyond the actual release unless you also know that the 
> .config has CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO="none".

We've come a full circle ...

That's the current !CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO status quo ... That was 
being asked to be preserved for (unspecified) packaging reasons. So
your suggestion is to do away with that behavior altogether?

	Ingo