Re: [Gnu-arch-users] What are version numbers?

[Denys Duchier]

Tom Lord <address@hidden> writes:

> Why do GCC releases and development lines have version numbers?
> [...]
> I'm not to clear why you would find this mysterious.

The problem starts with the docs:

   Version numbers in `arch' are _not_ the name of a particular
   "snapshot" or release of your project - though they are related to that
   concept.   Instead, version numbers are the name of a "development
   line": a sequence of changes that you make while creating a particular
   release.

This appears to state that the release version and the branch version
are different things... and that make sense to me.  We might choose to
maintain some correlation to avoid utter confusion, but that's just a
convenient convention.  For example, there might be a gcc--3.0 branch
out of which we successively cut 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 releases.  But we
could just as well have used a gcc3--1.0 branch.

This is a source of confusion.  Hence the suggestion to drop the
branch version altogether, since it doesn't seem to add any value that
we could not just as easily have by naming branches gcc-3.0, gcc-3.1,
gcc-3.2, gcc-3.3 or just one big branch gcc-3.x (ok, the syntax with
the periods here is probably illegal for arch, but you get the point).

Cheers,

-- 
Dr. Denys Duchier
Équipe Calligramme
LORIA, Nancy, FRANCE