[FFmpeg-devel] release

[Robert Swain]

2009/1/29 Aurelien Jacobs <aurel at gnuage.org>:
> On Wed, 28 Jan 2009 20:35:20 -0800
> Mike Melanson <mike at multimedia.cx> wrote:
>> Diego Biurrun wrote:
>> > Let's get the two biggest bikeshed topics out of the way right now:
>> >
>> > - release date: weekend 2009-02-21/22
>> > - release name: 0.5
>> >
>> > There, progress, it feels so great...
>>
>> Awesome. No argument here. Does anyone have a reason why we shouldn't go
>> with 0.5 for a release?
>
> Why 0.5 ? Is it to make people think this is the successor of the
> (never released) 0.4.9 ? IMHO it is not the successor of 0.4.9, it
> is much more than that.

I think this part of your argument is where the bike shed discussion
will begin. Trying to apply a number that has sufficient meaning to
represent what has happened since the last release. I think this is
pointless and we should rather consider this the first release and
have its version number just be something. It doesn't matter what the
number is.

Then again, the title of a release can be good for some marketing. KDE
4.2 has just been released and it seems over the past months 4.0 and
4.1 have received bad press as not being good quality releases. 4.2
has been released with the title "The Answer". This immediately
suggests that it is more stable and feature complete than the previous
two point releases.

Maybe whatever version number we use could have a tag line that
exemplifies what we, the developers, consider this release to mean.
This takes the emphasis off the meaning of the numbers and allows us
to always mean what we want it to.

> 0.5 can also be confusing related to the library major number. People
> will wonder, "hey, I downloaded 0.5 but I still only get libavutil49 !"
> (IIRC 49 was derived from 0.4.9)....

This is possibly a reasonable point. I think ideally the library
version numbers should be linked to the release version number but
that would require changing the way the libraries are versioned. Maybe
we should just document the library version numbers that correspond to
a particular release.

> Also, if we choose 0.5, what will be next version ? 0.5.1 ? 0.6 ? Will
> we discuss this at each release ?

This is a reasonable point and possibly one worth discussing a bit but
not necessarily right now.

> The alternative to avoid any confusion and any discussion about how
> much we increase the number at each release is obviously to use date
> as the release number (be it Y.MM or YYYY.MM or YYYYMMDD).
> It seems I'm not the only one who think it would be better:
> http://multimedia.cx/eggs/gaining-momentum/#comments

I'd be happy with a date (YY.MM or so) or "Release NN". We don't
intend to make bugfix releases so I think something like this would be
more suitable than 0.5, but I don't really care about the number.

Regards,
Rob