William A. Rowe, Jr. wrote:
Martin Sebor wrote:
[...]
However, I believe that the issue can be just as effectively
dealt with by implementing the -rcN (or similar) suffix policy
that Bill mentioned in his first post, with the additional
(and IMO essential) advantage of preserving the well-established
meaning of the version number grounded in precisely defined
technical criteria.
I agree with Martin -if- the SVN tag is also designated tags/1.2.3-rcN
until it's voted in, and then copied or renamed to tags/1.2.3 upon release.
I have no objection to tagging the 1.2.3 branch 1.2.3-rcN for each
tarball that's about to be voted on but I suspect that may not fully
address your concerns (i.e., the fact that there is a 1.2.3 branch
before an official release has taken place).
If there is an easy way to rename a branch I suppose we could start
with a 1.2.3-not-an-official-release-yet (or whatever) branch and,
once the release is approved, rename it to 1.2.3.
But I feel that this seems like going too far. I have been following
several open source projects for years (e.g., gcc, glibc, GNU make,
STLport) but this is the first time I've ever even heard of this
policy. Do you know of any projects outside the ASF that use it? If
not, I wonder what it is about the ASF that makes us different from
the other open source projects and that requires us to adopt such
an unconventional policy.
Martin
