Re: Linux 2.6.32-rc3

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Tue, 6 Oct 2009, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
> hm, i think you ignored (or missed, or found irrelevant) my first 
> suggested variant:

No, I didn't ignore it, it just showed that you didn't know what you were 
thinking about.

>  v2.6.31
>  v2.6.31+
> 
> The '+' sign says that it's more than .31.

No. It shows no such thing. Because it DOES NOT EXIST in other peoples 
trees until they rebase on top of mine.

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?

If so, then I don't hate "v2.6.31+", but at the same time, that single 
plus-sign tells _so_much_ less than v2.6.31-1234-g16123c4 that I think 
it's really sad and crippled. 

Is it so hard to teach people what "v2.6.31-1234-g16123c4" means? It's not 
like it's very complicated, and it's not like it's not visually very 
distinct indeed from the tagged release case (which is just "v2.6.31").

I'd love to use "+" instead of "-", but I was thinking that there are 
various version things that get unhappy about special characters like 
that, so we've always used '-' as the separator (since we've always used 
it).

So I'm _entirely_ open to changing how 'CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO' works, 
or extending on that notion. 

What I'm _not_ open to doing is to add made-up commits that change the 
top-level Makefile at non-release points. Because that way really does lie 
insanity.

		Linus