Re: [libvirt] Switch to a time based version number rule

On Mon, 2016-06-13 at 17:42 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 06:36:50PM +0200, Andrea Bolognani wrote: > >  > > On Mon, 2016-06-13 at 13:56 +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: > > >  > > > I venture to suggest that the reasons for switching from feature to > > > time based release schedules, also apply to version numbers. IOW we > > > should switch to a time based version number change rule, instead of > > > a feature based version number change rule. > > >   > > >   > > > So what I'm suggesting is that we adopt the following rule > > >   > > >   - major: bumped for the first release of each year > > >   - minor: bumped for every major release > > >   - micro: bumped for stable branch releases >  > > I don't like this. A widely used convention is to bump major > > when breaking backwards compatibility, minor when adding > > features in a backwards-compatible way, and micro when fixing > > bugs that don't alter the interface. Releasing a 2.0.0 would > > read, for many, as we had just broken API / ABI compatibility. >  > That convention isn't applicable for libvirt since we promise > to never break API / ABI, and we've already bumped major version > number in the past without anyone getting confused. . The libvirt > ELF so version number is explicitly separated and distinct from > the release version numbers, as due to our ABI promise we are > fixed at libvirt.so.0 forever.  So I don't see any compelling > reason to stick with major==1  forever in our release versions Fair enough. I still think people will be confused, but I guess once we start bumping the major version number once a year they'll get around to it. If we really want to go time-based, why don't we keep it really straightforward and predictable and do   July 2016     -> 2016.7.0   August 2016   -> 2016.8.0   ...   January 2017  -> 2017.1.0   February 2017 -> 2017.2.0 If we'll happen to skip a month for whatever reason, we can simply skip the corresponding minor number.