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Re: [Gnu-arch-users] What are version numbers?
From: |
Tom Lord |
Subject: |
Re: [Gnu-arch-users] What are version numbers? |
Date: |
Wed, 10 Sep 2003 14:28:47 -0700 (PDT) |
> From: Denys Duchier <address@hidden>
> Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:
> > Why do GCC releases and development lines have version numbers?
> > [...]
> > I'm not to clear why you would find this mysterious.
> The problem starts with the docs:
>
> Version numbers in `arch' are _not_ the name of a particular
> "snapshot" or release of your project - though they are related to that
> concept. Instead, version numbers are the name of a "development
> line": a sequence of changes that you make while creating a particular
>
> This appears to state that the release version and the branch version
> are different things... and that make sense to me. We might choose to
> maintain some correlation to avoid utter confusion, but that's just a
> convenient convention. For example, there might be a gcc--3.0 branch
> out of which we successively cut 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 releases. But we
> could just as well have used a gcc3--1.0 branch.
You're right that the correlation is convention but overall I think
you're misreading that section of the docs (which I'll try to remember
when I revise the docs).
All I really meant to say there is that the arch version id is the
name of a development line, not a particular tree. Thus, GCC might
plan for a 4.0 release (a particular tree) but when they go to do the
work, they'll want a gcc--devo--4.0 (a development line, containing a
series of revisions leading up to the release gcc-4.0 and perhaps
containing subsequent revisions for gcc-4.0.1 etc.).
> This is a source of confusion. Hence the suggestion to drop the
> branch version altogether, since it doesn't seem to add any value that
> we could not just as easily have by naming branches gcc-3.0, gcc-3.1,
> gcc-3.2, gcc-3.3 or just one big branch gcc-3.x (ok, the syntax with
> the periods here is probably illegal for arch, but you get the point).
We'll see. Personally, I've _already_ found considerable value in
branch labels in version ids when I start working with someone's
archive who has asked me to merge in some changes. I think that will
only crescendo over time as higher-level tools are built on top of
arch.
Sure, I agree -- there are some "does it scale _down_?" issues here --
but so far they look minor.
-t
Re: [Gnu-arch-users] What are version numbers?, Andrew Suffield, 2003/09/10
Re: [Gnu-arch-users] What are version numbers?, Zack Brown, 2003/09/10