Pre-release kernel versioning

[Thorsten Leemhuis]

David Woodhouse schrieb:
> On Tue, 2007-05-01 at 10:26 +0200, Thorsten Leemhuis wrote:
>> But calling something foo (2.6.20) if upstream calls itself bar (2.6.21)
>>  just created addition problems for Fedora users and contributors (like
>> in this madwifi case). So why obscure the version number it? Why not
>> follow upstream, which is afaik one of the goals of Fedora. 
> We can't name it like upstream -- we can't actually use the '-rc1'
> postfix. So whatever we'll do will have to be different from upstream.

Sure -- all I want is to leave "VERSION = foo" in the top-level Makefile
from linux unchanged. Adding other stuff like the CVS-rev (as we do
already) to EXTRAVERSION is fine. Leaving "-rc1" or "-git1" in it would
be nice, and is in line with our guidelines.

> There really is little point in changing what we've been doing for
> years, and what people are used to.

"People complaining about it" and "be consistent with the guidelines"
are IMHO two good reason to change it.

Nobody came up with good reasons why we are doing it like that. There
was the rumor "because Linus doesn't like it" , but iirc somebody on
Fudcon saying that he doesn't care. And other distros don't seem to do
such stupid tricks either.

> There will _always_ be muppets out there who complain about it just
> because it's Fedora. And out-of-tree modules will always be painful.

Agreed.

> Screwing with nomenclature really doesn't change either of those.

We are screwing atm, as we change VERSION in the Makefile to be
different from upstream. I want us stop screwing, as that makes life
harder for users and kmod packagers.

CU
thl