In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Daniel Veditz wrote:
> Long lived branches are a fact of life

If Gecko is going to branch, a time stamp for it's version is a very
poor choice. And a time stamp plus some delimiter, and (to Gecko
itself) irrelevant data, like how many days it's been branched by
Netscape is no better.

A branch is one thing, but what major rendering changes is Netscape
doing to Gecko in their branch? If there are major changes needed,
send the patch upstream to Mozilla.org to be integrated into the Gecko
product. You don't have to match exactly, but you should use
Gecko/YYYYMMDD where YYYYMMDD is a version of the REAL Gecko that
would render the same.

If you're altering the Gecko product more then can be kept in sync
with the trunk during your branch, then you should start calling it
NetscapeGecko/anyVersionYouWant.

> mozilla.org itself expects the magic 1.0 branch to live as long as a
> year and a half with active derivatives. Those derivatives *will be*
> Gecko derivatives

I'm not aware of any public plans that discus Mozilla.org's direction
post-1.0. If what you say is true, and there will be a long lived
branch, for the Browser suite and sub-products such as Gecko, versions
numbers need to reflect this. Might I suggest the "Linux versioning
system"?

Mozilla 1.0 U-A:    Mozilla/5.0 (comments) Gecko/1.0 Seamonkey/1.0
Mozilla 1.0.1 U-A:  Mozilla/5.0 (comments) Gecko/$X Seamonkey/1.0.1

Note the Seamonkey token name subject to change. $X is unknown because
Gecko would be free to follow its own development schedule. If
browser-1.0.1 comes out soon, and no changes were made to Gecko, it's
still 1.0. If Netscape does a branch with Gecko 1.0, needs a few more
features, and contribs patches upstream to M.org, Netscape's release
will use "Gecko/1.0.1". If M.org's next release makes more changes, $X
could end up being 1.0.2, when the browser-suite is only at 1.0.1. The
time stamp could continue to be used on the unstable trunk, as hard
version numbers aren't needed.

Summary: timestamps don't branch. timestamp+delimiter is an ugly hack.

> Gecko/20010904.45           // pulled 45 days into a branch

Who's branch? Gecko's branch?

> Gecko/20011019 (rv:0.9.4)   // pulled 10/19 based on 0.9.4

Separate products.

Shouldn't dbaron be involved in the discussion here?

/jmd

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