[Plplot-devel] library version

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Rafael Laboissiere wrote:

> I have a mission on earth: to avoid propagation of misunderstanding of the
> purpose of library versioning.  Please, help me to achieve that :-)
>

I am going to take this discussion to the list.

I asked for library version discussion before the 5.2.0 release, but nobody
cared at the time.  So I think all of us will probably go along with
whatever you decide. Note, I don't want to be involved in the decision
making on library version because I don't have the time to keep track of
what kind of API change occurred since the last release for each and every
library.  I know that is sloppy, but I am already too overloaded with PLplot
stuff.

If you decide to go forward with this change, you should remember
libtclmatrix is completely independent so it potentially should have
independent version numbers. I am not sure whether our other libraries
should have common version numbers or not, but you should check that.  If
you decide to keep track of the API changes for each library, I presume you
should make a decision about library version numbers for each library and
commit that result roughly a week before release.  I would definitely
welcome your effort on this, but if you don't have time for that, I fully
understand because I don't have time for it myself....;-)

An alternative to the maintenance effort of keeping track of all API changes
for each library is we could always blindly increment the major library
version number for each and every release.  That is roughly compatible with
reality which is there is always some API change for most releases. The only
downside I can see of blind major number incrementing is we may soon get to
library versions in the teens or even in the twenties, but at some point I
am sure it is possible to recycle again and start back at the minimum
library number (1.0.0?).  In fact, as far as I am concerned, we could start
at the minimum library version number for the next release to emphasize the
point that it is different from the package version.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and
Analysis (www.cccma.bc.ec.gc.ca) and the PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org).

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