RE: About dialog api

[Joe Shaw <joe ximian com>]

On Thu, 2003-04-24 at 05:22, Murray Cumming Comneon com wrote:
> I've never understood the point of build numbers. Companies should release
> versions. You can't release 2 binaries which have the same version but are
> somehow different. I guess that a build number is just a version number
> that's harder to read. It doesn't sound like something we should encourage.

It makes sense for things like snapshots, where you don't want to
artificially bump up the version number, but there is other information
there (a date) which can make identifying bugs easier.

Also distributions may need to rebuild packages without bumping up the
version number (because it's not their software, for example).  That's
why RPM and dpkg have revisions.  These could be passed in as builds to
help identify specifically what version someone is using without making
them go to a terminal and type "rpm -q foo".

I won't lose any sleep if it isn't there, but there is some use for it,
and having it in GTK may be an incentive for authors and distributors to
use it.

Joe