Re: getting started on 2.8

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2004 at 12:19:07PM +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> 
>   + One minor versioning change I'd suggest we follow from here on is 
>     that we should bump the version number of a module *after* a release
>     rather than before. A minority of modules do it this way now, but it
>     would be helpful if we all did it this way ... especially the 
>     libraries.
> 
>     Consider the case where a new API gets added to gtk+ CVS HEAD and 
>     the panel immediately uses it. Because the gtk+ version number gets 
>     bumped just before a release, there is no way for the panel to 
>     require the unreleased version. Instead we quite often find 
>     ourselves releasing tarballs which depend on unreleased versions of 
>     libraries and the tarball only fails to build at link time.

Amen brother.

I've been using this convention for libgnomeprint*, control-centre
and gnumeric for a while now and find that it helps clarify the
distinction between HEAD and the latest release.  This is _not_ a
suggestion to bump verions every time api changes, we tried that in
gal long ago and people's heads exploded.

The only wrinkle I've seen to date is that it is periodically
usefule  to do point releases by bumping the micro version number of
the last release.

    1) Release 2.7.0 and bump cvs to 2.7.1
    2) make some changes in cvs that are not ready for release
    3) find bug in 2.7.0
    4) release a 2.7.0.1 with the fix