Re: GNOME Desktop Version String

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Wed, 2002-03-06 at 11:49, Glynn Foster wrote:
> Yeah, that's the thing...it really doesn't make much sense when you've
> got people updating their system on a regular basis and getting the
> latest and greatest packages...

Well, it could, if there is some agreed upon standard for indicating
when things were last updated, etc.

> But for someone who gets *just* the releases, then this could prove
> useful...I guess we just need to have a think about how it could be
> useful.

I think it could be very useful, for a number of reasons- for example,
bug-buddy could grab it, and it would be easy to ask newbies who file
bugs 'tell me what version of gnome you have installed.' 

The trick is that '1.4' or '2.0' by themselves are not of much use.
Perhaps this could be a set of values of some type?

Like:
*Version- could be general, like 1.4, 2.0, etc.
*Vendor- Ximian, Red Hat, GNOME Packaging Project, Sun, etc.
*'Built on date'- not necessarily a build date, but a 'when released to
the world' type date, so that bug people have at least a rough estimate
of when it was built and what type of patches might be or not be in. For
vendors with updating stuff (like, say, if RH does a patch release of
major components, or Red Carpet updates key components) we could touch
this and update it.

I'm sure other fields could be useful here, but these are the things I'm
thinking of off the top of my head.
Luis



> 
> 			See ya,
> 				Glynn ;)
> 
> On Wed, 2002-03-06 at 16:43, Luis Villa wrote:
> > So, umm... what is a gnome desktop version, exactly? What would, say,
> > the string/number for what Ximian users have right now read? What should
> > it read if they update 1/2 of their gnome packages tomorrow, but, say,
> > libgnome is not in the set of updates? How would this differ from
> > someone who got the latest 1.4 from ftp.gnome.org? Would it differ at
> > all?
> > 
> > I'm all in favor of having some kind of across-the-entire-release
> > versioning scheme but at the moment it seems like we* don't have much
> > clue what such a version would mean or indicate. This, I think, makes
> > inserting such a thing into gnome-about and the like a little premature,
> > doesn't it?
> > 
> > Luis
> > 
> > *OK, /maybe/ just me... but I don't think I'm the only one.
> > 
> > 
> > On Wed, 2002-03-06 at 11:32, Glynn Foster wrote:
> > > Heya,
> > > I've just added a version string to the gnome-desktop cvs module on the
> > > advice of John here. I really think it's a good idea, and could act as a
> > > good way to identify what GNOME release you have. I know that certainly
> > > Sun would find such a string useful, and I figure that others will as
> > > well. Currently it is just a number, which could be turned into a
> > > translatable string if people thought it was worthwhile enough. 
> > > 
> > > It installs into $(prefix)/share/gnome-about/gnome-version as I figure
> > > it's probably a good idea to get this into the GNOME About dialog
> > > sometime soon. In any case, it's not doing any harm and could prove to
> > > be useful, so it's really just a mail to let you know [and to prompt
> > > discussion about how better it could be utilized].
> > > 
> > > 			See ya,
> > > 				Glynn ;)
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
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> > 
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> 
> 
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