Activity versioning schema

[C. Scott Ananian]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 6:07 PM, Eben Eliason <eben.eliason at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 5:55 PM, Jameson Chema Quinn <jquinn at cs.oberlin.edu>

I agree with almost everything jquinn said, except for the use of ':'
to delimit version numbers.  Like it or not, the rest of the software
world uses '.'.  If we're going to a 'dotted decimal' scheme, we
should use '.'.  The cost of doing things "our own way" is just too
high otherwise.

> I don't expect to have any encoded info which makes this decidedly easy.  I
> just want a simple way to say that versions 3.x - 5.x work on  OS release
> 8.2.  Nothing in the bundle needs to indicate that specifically, but at
> least we'd have a way to easily document compatibilities. I understand what

No, you've missed my point: it is *not possible* to put this
information in the bundle, because we don't *know* that version 8 is
incompatible with release 9.1 *until after 9.1 is released*.  So the
compatibility information has to be maintained externally.

So, that separates our concerns into two independent problems:
 a) is it worthwhile to add dotted decimal version numbers?  (I remain
unconvinced that this solves any problems, and introduces ambiguities
of comparison:  Is 1.1 "newer" or "older" than 1.11?)
 b) how to *externally indicate* which versions work with a given release.

  --scott

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