From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.0 (2014-02-07) on aws-us-west-2-korg-lkml-1.web.codeaurora.org Received: from vger.kernel.org (vger.kernel.org [23.128.96.18]) by smtp.lore.kernel.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 31161C636D7 for ; Thu, 2 Feb 2023 18:50:13 +0000 (UTC) Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S233020AbjBBSuL (ORCPT ); Thu, 2 Feb 2023 13:50:11 -0500 Received: from lindbergh.monkeyblade.net ([23.128.96.19]:33684 "EHLO lindbergh.monkeyblade.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S233054AbjBBSuH (ORCPT ); Thu, 2 Feb 2023 13:50:07 -0500 X-Greylist: delayed 348 seconds by postgrey-1.37 at lindbergh.monkeyblade.net; Thu, 02 Feb 2023 10:50:05 PST Received: from mail.aperture-lab.de (mail.aperture-lab.de [IPv6:2a01:4f8:c2c:665b::1]) by lindbergh.monkeyblade.net (Postfix) with ESMTPS id A3A2316327 for ; Thu, 2 Feb 2023 10:50:05 -0800 (PST) Received: from [127.0.0.1] (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by localhost (Mailerdaemon) with ESMTPSA id E5C9D417DD; Thu, 2 Feb 2023 19:44:09 +0100 (CET) Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2023 19:44:06 +0100 From: Linus =?utf-8?Q?L=C3=BCssing?= To: Jiri Pirko Cc: Simon Wunderlich , kuba@kernel.org, davem@davemloft.net, netdev@vger.kernel.org, b.a.t.m.a.n@lists.open-mesh.org Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/5] batman-adv: Start new development cycle Message-ID: References: <20230127102133.700173-1-sw@simonwunderlich.de> <20230127102133.700173-2-sw@simonwunderlich.de> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: X-Last-TLS-Session-Version: TLSv1.3 Precedence: bulk List-ID: X-Mailing-List: netdev@vger.kernel.org On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 03:55:08PM +0100, Jiri Pirko wrote: > Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 11:21:29AM CET, sw@simonwunderlich.de wrote: > >This version will contain all the (major or even only minor) changes for > >Linux 6.3. > > > >The version number isn't a semantic version number with major and minor > >information. It is just encoding the year of the expected publishing as > >Linux -rc1 and the number of published versions this year (starting at 0). > > I wonder, what is this versioning good for? The best reason in my opinion is that it's useful to convince ordinary people that they should update :-). Usually when debugging reported issues one of the first things we ask users is to provide the output of "batctl -v": ``` $ batctl -v batctl debian-2023.0-1 [batman-adv: 2022.3] ``` If there is a very old year in there I think it's easier to tell and convince people to try again with newer versions and to update. And also as a developer I find it easier to (roughly) memorize when a feature was added by year than by kernel version number. So I know by heart that TVLVs were added in 2014 and multicast snooping patches and new multicast handling was added around 2019 for instance. But don't ask me which kernel version that was :D. I'd have to look that up. So if "batctl -v" displayed a kernel version number that would be less helpful for me. Also makes it easier for ordinary users to look up and compare their version with our news archive: https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/open-mesh/wiki/News-archive Also note that we can't do a simple kernel version to year notation mapping in userspace in batctl. OpenWrt uses the most recent Linux LTS release. But might feature a backport of a more recent batman-adv which is newer than the one this stable kernel would provide. Or people also often use Debian stable but compile and use the latest batman-adv version with it. Does that make sense?