Re: [SQLObject] Releases and versioning.

[Ian B. <ia...@co...>]

Alan Kennedy wrote:
> I'm seeking some clarity on the versioning and release mechanism for 
> SQLObject.
> 
> On visiting the sqlobject.org site, various parts of the site refer to 
> the current version as 0.5.2. I.e. the front page has a list of "recent 
> releases", in which 0.5.2 is the most recent.

Damn.  I made changes to the website, uploaded them, but forgot to 
commit them, then uploaded other incremental changes from another site.

> But I know that 0.6 is available, because I checked it out of svn myself 
> :-) Or did I?
> 
> I thought that 0.6 was the latest version, but on looking at the News 
> page on the site, that lists 0.6.1 as the most recent release.
> 
> http://www.sqlobject.org/docs/News.html

Yeah... I guess that should be called "svn head", which will become 
0.6.1.  But somehow 0.6.2 got in my version of the News.  Huh.

> Also, the SQLObject documentation page is the one for 0.6.1.
> 
> http://sqlobject.org/docs/SQLObject.html

And I reuploaded the docs when I made some fixes (mostly which had 
nothing to do with 0.6.1).

> But I can't see anywhere on the site or on sourceforge to actually 
> download 0.6.1. The most recent release on sourceforge is 0.6.0. (I'm 
> uncertain as to whether "SQLObject-0.6-1.noarch.rpm" contains 0.6.0 or 
> 0.6.1?)
> 
> http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=74338
> 
> So I thought I'd go to the definitive source, the ColorStudy svn 
> repository. First, I tried to see if there were any svn tags set
> 
> prompt> svn ls svn://colorstudy.com/tags/SQLObject/
> svn: URL non-existent in that revision
> 
> But I see that the tagging is not used in that repository.

No.  There's no deep intention behind it.  OTOH, tagging vs. branching 
seems like a CVS concept, though maybe still a useful metaphor.  A tag 
is just a branch that we agree not to update.

> Then I tried
> 
> prompt>svn ls svn://colorstudy.com/branches/SQLObject/
> 
> Which got the following list
> 
> 0.5/
> 0.6/
> 
> I'm presuming that the latter contains the 0.6 code.
> 
> But which release? 0.6.0? 0.6.1? Or the head revision? It's confusing, 
> without going through the checkin logs in detail to see which version is 
> which.

There will be a 0.6.1 branch when that is released.

> Am I the only one who finds this confusing?
> 
> Lastly, I have a suggestion to make: use svn tagging to tag/label a 
> release so that it is easy to retrieve.
> 
> For example, if the 0.6.1 release had been tagged, then I could check 
> out the 0.6.1 release with a command like
> 
> svn co svn://colorstudy.com/tags/SQLObject/RELEASE_0_6_1
> 
> Or something like that. SVN tagging is a simple and powerful mechanism 
> to manage this sort of issue (I think RCS and CVS call it "labelling").
> 
> I like to use fixed versions of software, rather than the "bleeding 
> edge", straight form the repository: it makes testing, installation and 
> environment management *so* much easier.

Sure, I'm open to suggestions on the subversion layout.  At some point 
I'll probably refactor it some, at the same time that I move to http 
(Apache, instead of the standalone server).

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ia...@co...  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org