Suggested even/odd convention for the micro version numbers (like cairo)

["Tor Lillqvist" <tml iki fi>]

I humbly suggest that the versioning recommendation for the GTK+ stack
and GNOME in general is amended for the third "micro" part of the
version numbers to match the convention used in cairo.

See http://cairographics.org/manual/cairo-Version-Information.html .

In a nutshell, the idea is that released tarballs have an even micro
version. The micro version is bumped both immediately before and after
building the release tarball. The even micro number is never committed
to SVN. In SVN the micro number is always odd.

This has the advantage that there is never any confusion whether
pre-release or post-release bump is used. Code from a SVN checkout can
always be recognised by its odd micro number, and correspondingly code
from a released tarball is recognised by its even micro number.

One could imagine a module using a macro FOO_IS_DEVELOPMENT_VERSION()
that would return true either if 1) the minor version is odd (as the
convention already is in most (?) GNOME modules), or 2) the micro
number is odd (a build from SVN, presumably thus intended for local
hacking and not distribution).

I guess one disadvantage of this is that it might take a time before
people stop asking "what happened to version x.y.z". Also, one
probably needs to script the bump-make dist-bump sequence in order not
to forget it, at least initially.

I think the use of this convention is regarded as a success by people
working on cairo?

--tml