An un-release!

I've done a few driblets of work on the web UI over the past week, between and around being back to ${DAYJOB}, and have the very very basic display functional enough that I've enabled it on my gateway. So, if you'd like to see what the recent weather is like at the front of my house, surf on over to weatherPi at Handbasket House. I'm actually going to tag this with a version number, but I haven't decided on versioning yet, so the tag awaits this final bit of creativity.

Version numbers mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. The problem is, they mean different things to different sets of people. Engineers seem to want to encode all sorts of meaning in different pieces of a "version number." Whenever you see something like 2.04.11_3 in a version number, you just know that it was made up by an engineer.

Git and other distributed source code systems moved us away from revisions for source code. I don't expect to make "releases" of weatherPi all that often, certainly not more than once a month, so maybe I should just stick with year and month. Even Perforce, the dying king of source code revisioning, has used this nomenclature from the start.

Code names are fun, and make it easy to refer to a long-running project, but since weatherPi has (so far) precisely one contributor, coming up with a sequence of code names seems maybe more work than it needs. My last great commercial project used names of California beaches as an internal release name sequence, I could re-use that. I'm fond of national parks, too; current ${DAYJOB} has naming sequences for physical and virtual hosts using National Parks (Utah for physical machines, California for virtual machines) in one organization, National Parks and cities in Arizona in another. The primary windows server had to be named winslow, of course, so I stuck with 'Arizona cities mentioned in songs' for windows VMS, the other two are benson and flagstaff. Tons of kudos if you can find the song Benson is mentioned in.

So I think I'll stick with... 2020.01. Almost ubuntu-ish, isn't it? But Perforce was using it long before Ubuntu came along. Let's go tag this...