[libvirt] [RFC] Version numbers outside of releases

[Martin Kletzander]

On Thu, Jun 01, 2017 at 01:13:05PM +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote:
>Our current practice when it comes to bumping the version
>number for libvirt is to do so immediately after a release,
>eg. right after 3.4.0 is released later today someone will
>push a commit that changes configure.ac to use 3.5.0 instead.
>
>As a consequence, builds made from master will always carry
>the release number of the *upcoming* release, so from a
>versioning point of view there is no way to tell eg. 3.4.0-rc2
>or even the final 3.4.0 release apart from a random build made
>at a random time from master during 3.4.0's development cycle.
>
>In particular, when creating RPMs from a git clone, you'll end
>up having to use either 'dnf install' or 'dnf reinstall'
>depending on whether or not you already installed any build
>during the current development cycle.
>
>I suggest we change our habits slightly:
>
>  * right after X.Y.0 has been released, bump the version
>    number to X.Y.90;
>
>  * bump the version number to X.Y.91 for rc1, X.Y.92 for
>    rc2 and so on;
>
>  * only bump the version number to X.Y+1.0 as the release is
>    being prepared, then go back to the first step and move
>    on with development.
>
>This would make sure each step in the development cycle gets
>its own version number, and as a pleasant side effect you'll
>always be able to install newer builds using 'dnf install'.
>

Not really.  That is true only if you are building such RPM once between
release and the next rc.  If you do that twice, you need to do reinstall
anyway.  It could be fixed with appending the last two or three segments
of the commit description.  The package built now would be:

  libvirt-3.4.0-rc2-5-g316022183b0f

or

  libvirt-v3.3.0-164-g316022183b0f

I mean yeah, that numbering of yours is not bad, I'm all for it,
(although I like .50, like QEMU has, better ;).

The biggest issue is how to do this automatically.  I don't know if DV
has a script to do some things, but if he does, we could make it part of
the tree and bump the numbers automatically (we would benefit from that
even now, before this change).

I'm for the change, but just for FYI, I think you can always make the
install when specifying the package with a path, can't you?  Like this:

  dnf install ./libvirt-*.rpm

>Comments welcome! :)
>

+1 (is that how comments work nowadays?)

>-- 
>Andrea Bolognani / Red Hat / Virtualization
>
>--
>libvir-list mailing list
>libvir-list at redhat.com
>https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/libvir-list
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