SHORT VERSION
=============

Our nightly snapshot tarball filenames have become confusing.  Here's the most 
recent on each branch:

- Master: openmpi-v2.x-dev-3019-gbd1b6fe.tar.bz2
- v2.0.x: openmpi-v2.0.1-93-g97511a1.tar.bz2
- v2.x:   openmpi-v2.0.1-203-g56991c6.tar.bz2

I propose changing them to the following format:

    openmpi-${BRANCHNAME}-${YYYYMMDD}-${SHORTHASH}.tar.bz2

Here's what last night's tarballs would have looked like with that scheme:

    openmpi-master-20161017-bd1b6fe.tar.bz2
    openmpi-v2.0.x-20161017-a66f3e2.tar.bz2
    openmpi-v2.x-20161017-56991c6.tar.bz2

Optionally, we could put a HHMM timestamp in there for finer granularity.

MORE DETAIL
===========

We use "git describe" to come up with the version strings for our nightly 
snapshot tarballs.  "git describe" shows you three things:

- the first tag that it finds going back along the git commit history
- the number of commits it had to traverse to find that tag
- the short hast of the HEAD commit

For lack of a longer explanation, the names of the current snapshots *do* make 
sense given our commit and tag history; they're just... weird.

After talking this through with a colleague today, I think we have two choices:

1. Continue to use the "git describe" output
2. Come up with a different scheme

Using git describe output means that we are reliant on git tags.  Funky 
placement of git tags -- including the moving of branches back from 
ompi-release to ompi -- is how we ended up in this situation.  This might 
constitute empirical evidence that "git describe" is not a good solution for 
this community.

Instead, perhaps we should make a new scheme.  We need two properties in the 
snapshot filenames:

1. Name of the branch that the tarball came from.
2. Easily sortable by a human (i.e., know that tarball X came before or after 
tarball Y).

Property #1 is self-evident (the branch name is in the filename); property #2 
comes from the timestamp.  

NOTE: It may be desirable to add HHMM in there; it's not common, but 
*sometimes* we do make more than one snapshot in a day (e.g., if one snapshot 
is borked, so we fix it and then generate another snapshot).

-- 
Jeff Squyres
jsquy...@cisco.com
For corporate legal information go to: 
http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/cri/

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