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

[Jens Gehrlein <sew_s@tqs.de>]

Feng Kan schrieb:
> Albert ARIBAUD wrote:
>> 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,
>>   
> Perhaps the Version itself can be removed, there doesn't seems to be a 
> point about it.
> You can just do v2008.1. You can add a third field for the day for those 
> really serious
> bugs:)

Partially ack.
In principle, the version prefix is unnecessary, because year and month 
are clear. But it helps when sorting the version due to the existing 
"v1". For subversions I suggest a sequential number as suffix or an 
arbitrary string, e.g.:
v2.2008.10-001
v2.2008.10-rc2
v2.2008.10-projectX
v2.2008.10-experimental_091

Any opinions about upper case / lower case notation?

Kind regards,
Jens