On Wed, 1 May 2024 at 19:28, Daniel P. Berrangé <berra...@redhat.com> wrote: > I wonder, however, whether we would benefit from changing how we > update the VERSION file. > > eg instead of re-using the micro digit to indicate a dev or rc > snapshot, represent those explicitly. eg "9.1.0-dev" and > "9.1.0-rc1", "9.1.0-rc2", etc in VERSION. > > We don't use the full QEMU_VERSION in the code in all that many > places. It appears in some help messages for command line tools, > and in QMP query-version response, and in a few other misc places. > At a glance it appears all of those places would easily handle a > tagged version. > > For release candidates in particular I think it would be saner > to show the user the actual version the release is about to become, > rather than the previous release's version. This would make the > reported version match the rc tarball naming too which would be > nice.
I think the theory behind the VERSION file is that we want to be able to express the version: * purely numerically * in a strictly ascending order We expose the assumption of numeric versions in places like QMP's query-version command, which reports it as a set of ints. I think there's probably scope for making the "human friendly" version string be surfaced instead of the strictly-numeric one in more places, but I worry that breaking the "always numeric and ascending" rule might have subtle breakage for us or for downstream uses... thanks -- PMM
