[Distutils] recollections of Pycon distutils versioning discussion (part 2)

[Jean-Paul Calderone]

On Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:15:30 -0600, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn <zooko at zooko.com> wrote:
>On Jun 11, 2009, at 2:37 AM, Paul Moore wrote:
>>1. From your description of events, and from discussion here, the  "post" 
>>tag is clearly the least thought through aspect of all this.  So a 
>>proponent of this should step up to justify why 1.0.5.post3 is  required, 
>>when 1.0.5.3 is available already.
>
>My motivation is that the leading sequence of numbers is chosen by a  human 
>to communicate some information such as major rewrite (major),  feature 
>addition (minor), or bugfix (micro), while the numbers after  the "-r" or 
>the ".post" are chosen by the version control system to  simply count 
>patches or give a secure hash of the current tree state  or whatever. 
>Another bit of information that we thus encode into the  version number is 
>whether it is a stable release or a snapshot --  stable releases don't have 
>a -r$COUNT in their version number.
>
>The current stable release of Tahoe is v1.4.1, as visible on PyPI: 
>http://pypi.python.org/pypi/allmydata-tahoe .  The current snapshot  is 
>v1.4.1-r3908, as visible on our web server: http://allmydata.org/ 
>source/tahoe/tarballs/?C=M;O=D .
>
>If the new "rational version number" definition excludes ".post", and  if I 
>choose to make Tahoe snapshot version numbers be rational  version numbers, 
>then I could make snapshots be named e.g.  v1.4.1.3908.  Then I would have 
>v1.4.1.3909, etc. until one day I  would have v1.4.1.3948 and then v1.5.0. 
>The next snapshot would be  numbered v1.5.0.3949.  I would hope that people 
>who are looking for  stable releases don't find the v1.5.0.3949 tarball 
>(since it isn't on  PyPI), or if they do find it that they realize from the 
>extra long  version number that it is a snapshot instead of a stable 
>release.
>
>I'm willing to change my build system to produce $MAJ.$MIN.$MIC.post $COUNT 
>instead of $MAJ.$MIN.$MIC-r$COUNT, in order to achieve  rationality (i.e., 
>in order to make my versions look more like other  people's versions and in 
>order to be compatible with some  hypothetical far-future tool which is 
>picky and refuses to use  software with irrational version numbers).  I'm 
>not yet sure whether  I'm willing to change it to $MAJ.$MIN.$MIC.$COUNT.

This is basically how I feel about Twisted (and Nevow, Axiom, Mantissa,
Epsilon, Sine, Quotient, etc) right noow.

Jean-Paul