"Zack Weinberg" <zack@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Sun, Jan 14, 2024, at 1:49 AM, Mike Frysinger wrote: >> On 13 Jan 2024 15:58, Karl Berry wrote: >>> Another alternative: when this came up 30-odd years ago, rms changed the >>> GNU maintainers doc to suggest x.y.90, .91, etc. for pretests. Doing >>> that would at least have the benefit of following a recommendation, and >>> as a side effect, would also fix jami's assumption (poor practice though >>> it is, IMHO). >>> https://gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Test-Releases.html#Test-Releases >>> >>> Doing an ls -R on alpha (fp:/srv/data/ftp-mirror/alpha/gnu), it seems >>> (rough guess with some grep counting) the .90 convention is by far the >>> most common approach (a couple thousand), followed by the suffix letter >>> a la automake (~750 releases), followed by -rc (~360). -hexid and -date >>> are both trailing the field. Other random conventions also present. >>> >>> It all feels like bikeshedding to me, so my inclination is to do >>> nothing. If we do change, I think we should use .90. --best, karl. >> >> using .90 is certainly better than single-letters. if you're fine with >> it, then let's switch. > > For what it's worth, I had planned to switch Autoconf, starting with the > next release, to use *some* version numbering scheme for beta releases > that sorts correctly according to things like strverscmp() and > dpkg --compare-versions. The "append a letter to the version number > intended for the final release" convention makes these algorithms sort > the betas *after* the release, which is backwards. > > My plan *was* to append letters to the version number for the *previous* > release, with a gap (e.g. 2.72{j,k,...} would be prereleases for 2.73), > which I think is what Automake is doing now) but I like .9x version numbers > better because it's more common (as you observed) and therefore more likely > to be understood at sight. I'd actually forgotten that .9x versions were > an official GNU recommendation. > I was planning on finally filing a bug for this because I couldn't really package the latest automake pre-release given it totally breaks our sorting (and afaik sorting in every other PM too). We're used to .9x and it works fine for us. thanks, sam
