[Mesa-dev] Proposal of date-based Mesa versioning for 2017

[Kenneth Graunke]

On Saturday, October 1, 2016 9:46:45 PM PDT Marek Olšák wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I propose that we use versioning in the form of "year.quarter".
> 
> 2017 would start with 17.0, then 17.1, 17.2, 17.3 for following
> quarters of the year, respectively.
> 2018 would start with 18.0, then 18.1, 18.2, 18.3.
> 
> The motivation is that you can easily tell when a specific Mesa
> version was released with an accuracy of 3 months.
> 
> That's the only scheme that seems practical to me. Everything else
> seems arbitrary or random.
> 
> Opinions?
> 
> Marek

I like it.  We clearly need some kind of new scheme, and date based
versions are one of the more sensible ones out there.  They fit pretty
well with our time-based releases.  They make it easy to tell how old
people's drivers are.  They also avoid the version inflation of "every
release is a new major version".

One thing that's nice about using quarters is that the versions remain
sequential (17.0 -> 17.1 -> 17.2 -> ...) while the usual "month of the
release" scheme isn't (17.2 -> 17.5 -> ???).  Avoids the "but where's
17.3???" questions.  Also means the versions are unaffected by any
schedule slips.

Another way of thinking about it: the first release of the year gets
a major version bump.  Otherwise, the minor version increments each
release.  (Equivalent, but works if we change from quarterly releases
to something more or less frequent.)

--Ken
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