Re: Versioning/release policy proposal

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 6 Oct 2006, at 12:04, Dennis Leeuw wrote:

> , the only thing I miss is a rationale for the use of the SONAME  
> with a major.minor structure, instead of the more common major. I  
> think this would help in the understanding why, and resulting in  
> less discussion.

I have no real idea of what's more common, but my rationale for this  
is as follows ...
1. I assume that changing the major version number is primarily a  
marketing/presentation issue
2. I assume that we *must*, as a technical issue, change the SONAME  
when we break backward compatibility
3. I assume that our publicity issues and our technical issues will  
not  be in sync ... we most likely won't want to increment the major  
version number as often as we need to change the SONAME.

> I could even imagine that you use the SONAME major for make and  
> base, while keeping major.minor SONAME for gui/back unit they hit  
> 1.0. Just an idea.

I would prefer to try to keep to a consistent policy across all  
packages (though for make the SONAME issue is irrelevant as there is  
no dynamic library in the package), simply because consistency makes  
it easier to understand and follow.