Version numbers

[Gerdriaan Mulder]

In another context outside of this list, I was confused on the version 
numbering as well, where I ran 2.0.x version, and someone else ran 2.y, 
with y > x.

A small bit of digging revealed the following paragraph in the NEWS file 
(see for example 
<https://gitlab.nic.cz/labs/bird/-/blob/7d2c7d59a363e690995eb958959f0bc12445355c/NEWS#L45-50>):

   Notes:

   We changed versioning scheme from <epoch>.<major>.<minor> to more common
   <major>.<minor>.<patch> . From now on, you may expect that BIRD 
2.13.x will be
   strictly only fixing bugs found in 2.13, whereas BIRD 2.14 will also 
contain
   new features.

This was also announced on this list at the release of 2.13 (2023-04-23).

However, in a rather long range of x.y.z-like versions (with a somewhat 
different approach than semantic versioning), it does seem odd to leave 
out the .z-part on a new minor release, some 4 months after the last 
release. I suppose a small note of "on release of a new minor version, 
we leave out the '.<patch>' part" would help a lot for understanding the 
versioning system.

If lexicographical sort is indeed the way to go, then it would also be 
nice to have the download page <https://bird.network.cz/?download> 
reflect that sort. At this moment, '2.13.1' is sorted before '2.13'. 
This may apply for other pages as well.

Best regards,
Gerdriaan Mulder

On 13/01/2024 22:57, Maria Matejka via Bird-users wrote:
> Hello Ray and list,
> 
> thank you for pointing at this. We actually intend to do kinda the 
> semantic versioning, we only didn't see any reason to add a trailing zero.
> 
> Regarding your case, I'd suggest to _not_ rely on the versioning being 
> x.y.z; what we can promise (and probably should document) is that every 
> new version is lexicographically after any older one and doesn't contain 
> whitespace. We can even promise that it matches the regex [0-9.-a-z]+ … 
> but not much more – if you ever get in a situation where you need to 
> check a development version due to some bug, you're screwed with strict 
> x.y.z checks.
> 
> Also please note that we are not doing strictly the semantic versioning 
> as it is described on the website, there are some differences, notably 
> in what is considered a reason to bump the major version number.
> 
> Have a nice weekend!
> Maria
> 
> On 2024-01-12 13:08, Ray Bellis wrote:
>> Hi BIRD folks!
>>
>> Could you please consider using consistent semantic versioning in your 
>> release numbers? (see semver.org)
>>
>> Up until 2.13 all releases used the x.y.z format, with a trailing .0 
>> for the first release in each minor release.  However the the 2.13 and 
>> 2.14 releases did not - they just used x.y
>>
>> This broke our deployment code that uses semantic version aware checks 
>> to tell whether the running daemon is not the same as the available 
>> package.
>>
>> A formally adopted (and documented) version numbering policy would be 
>> of great use to system administrators.
>>
>> thanks,
>>
>> Ray
>>
> -- 
> Maria Matejka (she/her) | BIRD Team Leader | CZ.NIC, z.s.p.o.
>