[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Proposal to change Evergreen versioning scheme

[Jason Stephenson]

Quoting "Sharp, Chris" <csharp at georgialibraries.org>:

> As long as the tagged git version and the tarball match, I have no  
> problem with suggesting either, but I think tarballs are standard  
> and expected in F/LOSS projects.

They are becoming less so as more projects switch to git or some other  
distributed version control system. Mplayer2 is one project that has  
abandoned tarballs and versioned releases completely.

There is another place where versioned releases are tarballs help.  
That is with packaging software for distribution with certain  
GNU/Linux flavors. Most of their binary packaging systems depend on  
certain versioning styles to determine when to upgrade an installed  
package. Currently, this is not an issue for Evergreen, since the only  
way to install it at present is to compile it from source code.  
However, several in the community have ambitions of creating binary  
packages for Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora that users can just install and  
hopefully everything just works. Not having tarballs and versions will  
make their work slightly more difficult.

If we're voting again on version schemes, I would vote for the  
Ubuntu-style YY.MM type. After all, when you run from the master  
branch in git, the date you build it is more or less your version.

-- 
Jason Stephenson
Assistant Director for Technology Services
Merrimack Valley Library Consortium
Chief Bug Wrangler, Evergreen ILS