(Short?) merge window reminder

[david at lang.hm]

On Tue, 24 May 2011, Matthias Schniedermeyer wrote:

> On 23.05.2011 13:33, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 12:20 PM, Ingo Molnar <mingo at elte.hu> wrote:
>>>
>>> I really hope there's also a voice that tells you to wait until .42 before
>>> cutting 3.0.0! :-)
>>
>> So I'm toying with 3.0 (and in that case, it really would be "3.0",
>> not "3.0.0" - the stable team would get the third digit rather than
>> the fourth one.
>
> What about strictly 3 part versions? Just add a .0.
>
> 3.0.0 - Release Kernel 3.0
> 3.0.1 - Stable 1
> 3.0.2 - Stable 2
> 3.1.0 - Release Kernel 3.1
> 3.1.1 - Stable 1
> ...
>
> Biggest problem is likely version phobics that get pimples when they see
> trailing zeros. ;-)

since there are always issues discovered with a new kernel is released 
(which is why the -stable kernels exist), being wary of .0 kernels is not 
neccessarily a bad thing.

I still think a date based approach would be the best.

since people are worried about not knowing when a final release will 
happen, base the date on when the merge window opened or closed (always 
known at the time of the first -rc kernel)

in the thread on lwn, people pointed out that the latest 2.6.32 kernel 
would still be a 2009.12.X which doesn't reflect the fact that it was 
released this month. My suggestion for that is to make the X be the number 
of months (or years.months if you don't like large month values) between 
the merge window and the release of the -stable release. This would lead 
to a small problem when there are multiple -stable releases in a month, 
but since that doesn't last very long I don't see a real problem with just 
incramenting the month into the future in those cases.

David Lang