On 1/10/13 12:26 PM, "Noa Resare" <n...@spotify.com> wrote:
>I think it is very useful to be able to have some expectations on the >semantics of the releases that software projects releases. I like the >Semantic Versioning Specification(1), and I think it would be useful for >us >to adopt it to the extent possible. > >I don't know if you are familiar with that specification, but basically it >asserts that conforming software gets released with versions of format >MAJOR.MINOR.PATCHLEVEL and one can have certain expectations from those >releases based on which value has been incremented. > >In short, no additional functionality or API changes in PATCHLEVEL >increment releases, only backwards compatible changes in MINOR releases >and >MAJOR releases for backwards incompatible changes. > >So, my proposal would be to adopt the standard. > >The only thing I have noticed so far that we would need to change it the >system where there is voting several different software versions with the >same (final name). I think it would be much more convenient (and also >semver compliant) to release those as x.y.z-rcN and once the voting is >concluded create an x.y.z version that is identical to the last x.y.z-rcN >release. Having the same release with multiple version designators is much >better than having mulitple releases with the same version. > >While we're at it I would like to propose another constraint on prerelease >naming that is not part of semver, and that is that pre-releases have >names >that sort in lexical order. That way it gets much simpler to work with >packaging. > >Example: > >5.4.3 to 5.5.0-alpha1 (first WIP release of the 5.5.0 release cycle) >5.5.0-alpha1 to 5.5.0-alpha2 >5.5.0-alpha2 to 5.5.0-beta1 (okay, because b is sorted after a) >5.5.0-beta1 to 5.5.0-rc1 (first release candiate, also okay) >5.5.0-rc1 to 5.5.0-rc2 >5.5.0-rc2 to 5.5.0 (this is the actual release) > >These versions can be transposed into a package version in both rpm and >deb >universe using the pattern x.y.z-aN -> x.y.x-0.aN. This strategy will >break >if someone decides that 'almost_there' comes after 'rc', so please let's >not do that. > >/n > >1) http://semver.org I think we already do adopt semver. See this discussion http://markmail.org/thread/ltnzndyxxkik577x And this http://markmail.org/thread/adg4wdj27zfw2wa6 But the alpha / beta tags were not discussed. We did have rc tags after rounds of QA for 4.0
