[U-Boot-Users] RFC: U-Boot version numbering

[Albert ARIBAUD <albert.aribaud@free.fr>]

Wolfgang Denk a ?crit :
> Hello,
> 
> I would like to get your general opinion about  changing  the  U-Boot
> version numbering scheme.
> 
> To be honest, I never really understood myself how this  is  supposed
> to work and if the next version should be 1.3.4 or 1.4.0 or 2.0.0, i.
> e.  which  changes  / additions are important enough to increment the
> PATCHLEVEL or even VERSION number.
> 
> I therefor suggest to drop this style of version numbering and change
> to a timestamp based version  number  system  which  has  been  quite
> successfully  used  by  other  projects  (like  Ubuntu)  or  is under
> discussion (for Linux).
> 
> My suggestion for the new version numbers is as follows:
> 
> VERSION = 1	(at least for the time being)
> 
> PATCHLEVEL = current year - 2000
> 
> SUBLEVEL = current month
> 
> Both PATCHLEVEL and SUBLEVEL shall always be 2 digits (at  least  for
> the  next 91+ years to come) so listings for example on an FTP server
> shall be in a sane sorting order.
> 
> If we accept this system, the next release which probably comes out
> in October 2008 would be v1.08.10, and assuming the one after that
> comes out in January 2009 would be named v1.09.01
> 
> Comments?

A minor :) issue I can see is that there might be *some* confusion 
because of an apparent, numerical rollback from 1.3.4 back to 1.08.xx. 
You're bound to encounter some folks who will ask, again and again, why 
you're  working on 1.02.yy when 1.3.4 is out there.

Now an obvious solution would be to use 2 as the major number. If you're 
serious about not knowing when a major number bump-up is required, then 
you should be fairly ok with starting at 2.08.01 rather than 1.08.01. :)

Joke aside: you'll get questions *anyway*, and the scheme is as fine to 
me as it it.

Another, maybe trickier, issue is: you won't be able to cleanly number 
interim releases if you encounter a really serious bug right after 
you've produced this month's release, will you?

Amicalement,
-- 
Albert.