Releasing (was: Re: [self-interest] [Ann] Native)

Russell Allen mail at russell-allen.com
Sun Jan 5 02:43:02 UTC 2014


On 4 Jan 2014, at 11:02 pm, Tobias Pape <Das.Linux at gmx.de> wrote:
>> * Or maybe we should go down the Ubuntu path and call it 2014.1 ... Sounds newer :)
> 
> Yes but it only makes sense if you can guarantee regular releases.
> 2014.1 and then 2016.1 would be somewhat strange. 
> Also, a change in Versioning model should be well motivated :)
> 
> I think semantic versioning is still the way to go: http://semver.org/
> 
> And hence, 4.5.0 (commonly 4.5) would be the right choiceâ„¢ ;)
> So we should release a 4.5.0-rc.1 within the next time and if nobody complains (who should?)
> we can go 4.5.0 :D
> 
> Right then, on to 4.6.0-alpha


Semantic Versioning though is very based on the notion of a public API and gives useful information about the changes and meaning of that API.

I'm not sure that Self has a public API, at least not a well defined one. So the versioning maybe collapses into a simple major.minor.patch scheme which isn't as nice/useful.

The VM has a well defined API. Different parts of Self could define their API. Just not sure about the whole package.

Also from a user perspective, 2014.1 gives me more immediate info than 4.5.0.  It tells me that the project is alive, that it is likely to have been built on modern systems and likely to run on my modern system. 

OpenDylan who are also reinvigorating a minority language have gone with date versioning http://opendylan.org

You are right that it would need regular releases. But that is because the versioning system makes the lack of regular releases more apparent. We should be doing regular releases anyway (mea culpa)

But this is bikeshedding :)

I'll build a rc and let people have a look at it.

Russell



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