tag scheme

tag scheme

[Carsten Mattner]

I'm looking for advice on a tagging scheme, especially pros/cons
of using a 'v' prefix as in v2.1.0 like git does.

My impression is that using a common prefix for tags makes it
simple to distinguish from maintenance branches for past releases
but it seems that most repositories use tags without a prefix.
Before I settle on using vX.Y.Z (which I favor right now), I'd like to
understand why some projects do not prefix tags.

Any comments?

Re: tag scheme

[Jeff King]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 05:17:52PM +0100, Carsten Mattner wrote:

> I'm looking for advice on a tagging scheme, especially pros/cons
> of using a 'v' prefix as in v2.1.0 like git does.
> 
> My impression is that using a common prefix for tags makes it
> simple to distinguish from maintenance branches for past releases
> but it seems that most repositories use tags without a prefix.
> Before I settle on using vX.Y.Z (which I favor right now), I'd like to
> understand why some projects do not prefix tags.

I cannot speak definitely for people who prefer no prefix, but I imagine
that they simply see it as useless noise.

Personally, I like the prefix because it lets me wildcard-match only the
releases (and not other random tags I might have):

  git tag -l 'v*'

Of course I quite often want to drop release-candidate tags from such a
list, too, and I have to resort to "grep -v -- -rc" to do so. :)

-Peff

Re: tag scheme

[Rick Umali]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 12:09:42PM -0500, Jeff King wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 05:17:52PM +0100, Carsten Mattner wrote:
> > I'm looking for advice on a tagging scheme, especially pros/cons
> > of using a 'v' prefix as in v2.1.0 like git does.
> > 
> > My impression is that using a common prefix for tags makes it
> > simple to distinguish from maintenance branches for past releases
> > but it seems that most repositories use tags without a prefix.
> > Before I settle on using vX.Y.Z (which I favor right now), I'd like to
> > understand why some projects do not prefix tags.
> 
> I cannot speak definitely for people who prefer no prefix, but I imagine
> that they simply see it as useless noise.
> 
> Personally, I like the prefix because it lets me wildcard-match only the
> releases (and not other random tags I might have):
> 
>   git tag -l 'v*'
> 
> Of course I quite often want to drop release-candidate tags from such a
> list, too, and I have to resort to "grep -v -- -rc" to do so. :)

I wanted to second the prefix notation. I have a repository with 
three tag prefixes (namespaces?): SUBMIT, CODE and V. The prefix 
helps me stay organized. I've been adding -n to the git tag command
that Jeff mentioned:

git tag -l -n 'SUBMIT*'
-- 
Rick (www.manning.com/umali) Umali