Re: [PATCH 00/14] hw: define and enforce a standard lifecycle for versioned machines

[Peter Maydell]

On Wed, 1 May 2024 at 19:28, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> wrote:
> I wonder, however, whether we would benefit from changing how we
> update the VERSION file.
>
> eg instead of re-using the micro digit to indicate a dev or rc
> snapshot, represent those explicitly. eg "9.1.0-dev" and
> "9.1.0-rc1", "9.1.0-rc2", etc in VERSION.
>
> We don't use the full QEMU_VERSION in the code in all that many
> places. It appears in some help messages for command line tools,
> and in QMP query-version response, and in a few other misc places.
> At a glance it appears all of those places would easily handle a
> tagged version.
>
> For release candidates in particular I think it would be saner
> to show the user the actual version the release is about to become,
> rather than the previous release's version. This would make the
> reported version match the rc tarball naming too which would be
> nice.

I think the theory behind the VERSION file is that we want
to be able to express the version:
 * purely numerically
 * in a strictly ascending order

We expose the assumption of numeric versions in places like
QMP's query-version command, which reports it as a set of ints.

I think there's probably scope for making the "human friendly"
version string be surfaced instead of the strictly-numeric
one in more places, but I worry that breaking the "always
numeric and ascending" rule might have subtle breakage for
us or for downstream uses...

thanks
-- PMM