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

[Lazar, Alexey Vladimirovich]

On 2013-01-04, at 16:38 , Justin Hopkins <justin at mobiusconsortium.org> wrote:

> I think Dan hit the nail on the head, especially with his first and last paragraphs.

Justin, it was clear from your first response to my post that you seem to be frustrated that I brought up this topic.

Even though I think I generally understand your sentiment, what's your idea? That we keep *not* following the current versioning scheme, in essence not having a version scheme?

If we have one, let's use it. If it does not work, because it is too complicated to maintain, let's consider a simple low-maintenance scheme instead, which was what my proposal was all about, basically.

> 
> Justin Hopkins
> Manager Information Technology
> 573-808-2309
> 
> On 1/4/13 2:52 PM, Dan Scott wrote:
>> On Fri, Jan 04, 2013 at 03:21:08PM -0500, Rogan Hamby wrote:
>>> I would disagree.  It's not this one:
>>> http://www.open-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=versioning
>>> 
>>> But, I would propose that we are following one based largely on the
>>> developer's perception of what are major and minor features and impact for
>>> users.  I've been there for a few of those discussions and those were the
>>> concerns voiced when discussing version numbers.  Unintentional?  I can't
>>> speak to that.  But, to me what is already being done, as abstract and ill
>>> defined as it is (and I think that is part of what bothers some) - works.
>>>  I'm fine with things as they are.  It works with the larger community's
>>> goals (or at least mine) and a raw number means something to the front line
>>> users.
>> If we had a marketing team, and they had done some research that showed
>> that version numbers actually matter when it comes to perceptions of a
>> library system's stagnation (or not) and adoption of said system, then I
>> would defer to their decision. But as far as we know, we don't have a
>> marketing team, and I haven't seen any citations about such research on
>> generic software products in the discussion to date.
>> 
>> On the argument that we're not following our current versioning scheme
>> criteria around the major number - I like James' pointer to the semantic
>> versioning proposal, and that fits quite well with library
>> versioning semantics that we're already doing (to some extent) via
>> autotools.
>> 
>> That said, given that some major piece of infrastructure is likely to
>> always change (Dojo or PostgreSQL or XULRunner or Apache or any of the
>> other umpteen dependencies that we have), we could either strike the
>> pertinent clauses from the versioning scheme in the wiki, or alter it to
>> say that it will be incremented when major features are added.
>> 
>> As someone who is (currently very slowly) working towards packaging
>> Evergreen, I would much prefer version numbers and tarballs to just
>> pulling directly from git. Tarballs are a much lower barrier to entry
>> and having a release artifact means that (in theory) the people testing
>> the release candidates are all testing the same base code, without
>> differences based on their local version of tools that generate the code
>> that is in the tarball and not in git.
>> 
>> I don't like the date approach very much as, although we've agreed to
>> time-based releases, we've also agreed to let the release date slip if
>> there are known blockers. So we could end up with 13.04 / 13.11 / 14.05
>> / 14.10, and that would lead to references to 13.10 having to be updated
>> in multiple places to 13.11 if we slip. Bah.
>> 
>> I think a lot of the "Is it going to be a huge pain to upgrade? Or is it
>> just a minor upgrade?" angst would be diminished if we (devs and release
>> managers) did a better job of communicating expectations about each
>> upcoming release. We pledged to do this at EGConf 2012 and had a good
>> start, but need to stay vigilant on this front - and pitch in on the
>> documentation (release notes & upgrade notes).
>> 
>> I will admit to suffering from fatigue around this discussion, which
>> last came up in May:
>> http://libmail.georgialibraries.org/pipermail/open-ils-dev/2012-May/008203.html
>> 
>> In the end, I'd really like to not have this discussion come up on a
>> regular basis. There's code and docs and tests and websites to be worked
>> on, and a product that is solid and reliable and easy to understand and
>> use is going to succeed no matter how much the version numbers diverge
>> from the scheme documented on a wiki page. And if the current problem
>> can be rectified by striking out two clauses from the wiki page, why
>> don't we just do that so we can focus on everything else we have to work
>> on?
> 

Aleksey Lazar
PALS
IS Developer and Intergrator
507-389-2907
http://www.pals.org/
alexey.lazar at mnsu.edu