Release versioning

[Kevin E Martin]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 09:44:36PM -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Kevin E Martin wrote:
> | On Wed, Jul 27, 2005 at 09:04:29PM -0700, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> |
> |>Kevin E Martin wrote:
> |>| Packages in official X.Org releases need to be easily identified with
> |>| the release in which they were included.
> |>
> |>Why is this? I think it's the job of the "release platform" as a whole
> |>to specify which package versions it contains, and not the job of each
> |>package within that release.
> |
> |
> | The distribution/vendor can choose exactly what versions they want to
> | ship in their distro/product.  However, the X.Org Foundation makes
> | releases as well, and those are the only ones that will use this
> | versioning scheme.
> 
> Maybe I wasn't clear enough in my question. Let me provide an example.
> 
> In my view, X.Org should say "We're releasing X11R7. It contains these
> packages:
> 	libXrender 0.9.3
> 	libXcursor 0.8.2
> 	xkbcomp 1.0.0
> 	etc..."
> 
> The packages would just have what you called the "package development"
> version and not the X release version. The latter would be sufficiently
> specified by the release announcement.

That gives no branding, which is very important to the X.Org Foundation,
especially with the long history of X releases -- all named by their
release version.  Also, it makes it difficult to identify which release
the development package is a part of (e.g., to find that info, you would
need to search for the press release or go to a specific website/wiki
page or ...).  By including both, then it is easily identified with the
release.

Also, you're perfectly welcome to include whatever versions you like
into your product/distro.  That's one of the benefits of modularization.
If you'd prefer to use the unbranded versions of the packages, then you
can run the release script and not pass in the release version string to
create them.