Hi,

A traditional major.minor.patch sounds good to me.  I do not particularly like the linking recommendations that APR has, which are:

libNAME-MAJOR.so.0.MINOR.PATCH

I would like to avoid tying a particular compilation style with the versioning scheme.

I would propose:
1) MAJOR is incremented for non-backward-compatible wire compatibility, source compatibility, or binary compatibility changes
2) MINOR is incremented for backward-compatible wire, source, or binary compatibility changes.  MINOR changes may not be forward compatible.
3) PATCH is incremented when there are no wire, source, or binary compatibility changes.

So,
- It is safe to upgrade or downgrade within the same MAJOR.MINOR release.
- It is safe to upgrade within the same MAJOR release.
- No guarantees are made between MAJOR releases.

I like version numbers that are informative to the sysadmins like this.  I also think the version numbers should be separate to the release policy and the support policy.

Brian

On Sep 17, 2010, at 2:05 AM, Peter Elmer wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On Sep 17, 2010, at 8:41, Dirk Duellmann <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> since the last call I had a look at several existing project policies and it seems to me that 
>> classical major.minor.patch structure should work well and most users will 
>> have a reasonable expectation what a version change means. For a more formal definition 
>> of the change semantics in each number we could maybe adapt eg the simple approach 
>> described on
>> http://apr.apache.org/versioning.html
> 
> This also seems reasonable to me. (I think the date-time scheme was my
> fault^H^H^H^H^Hidea, and was only really meant for the very early period,
> now years ago, in xrootd development when only a few places deployed it
> and usually were very close to the latest version. A more standard scheme is long
> since due!) 
> 
>                                  Pete
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Peter Elmer     E-mail: [log in to unmask]      Phone: +41 (22) 767-4644
> Address: CERN Division PPE, Bat. 32 2C-14, CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>