Re: [Emutos-devel] [hatari-devel] EmuTOS version number display

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On 03/10/2020 at 10:09, Thomas Huth wrote:
1) It's slightly confusing to sometimes have one dot in the version string, and sometimes not.

From a programming view, yes.

From the user view, on the contrary, it is supposed to be simpler. Use only major.minor for normal releases, then append a third number for rare bugfix releases (a thing which only happened once in 19 years of EmuTOS existence). So we expect to see only 2 numbers most of the time, or 3 numbers in very rare occasions.

2) It has implications on sorting of directory listings, e.g.:
$ touch emutos-1.0.zip
$ touch emutos-1.0.1.zip
$ touch emutos-1.0.2.zip
$ ls -l
total 0
-rw-rw-r--. 1 thuth thuth 0 Oct  3 10:03 emutos-1.0.1.zip
-rw-rw-r--. 1 thuth thuth 0 Oct  3 10:08 emutos-1.0.2.zip
-rw-rw-r--. 1 thuth thuth 0 Oct  3 10:03 emutos-1.0.zip
==> Wrong ordering, the 1.0 should come first.

This is true.
But does it matter?
For example, I'm pretty sure that version numbers of Debian packages don't follow the alphabetical order either.

3) The code for displaying the version is more complicated in every emulator that supports it

I definitely agree with you. This is why I generally prefer using the "string version" provided by EmuTOS, when there is room to display it (it can be rather long for manual builds and snapshots). The "string version" is what is displayed on the EmuTOS welcome screen and about box, it can't be wrong.

4) When talking about version numbers, and saying something like "1.0", I'm normally used to referring all versions 1.0.x with that term.

5) If I see an emulator that shows "EmuTOS v1.0", I as a normal user can't tell if the emulator is showing 1.0.0 here or if the author of the emulator just messed it up and always cuts the last digit, so that e.g. 1.0.1 also shows up as 1.0.

I can't see a good reason why an emulator would cut the third digit (when non-zero). That would only bring confusion.

6) That rule isn't even mentioned in doc/version.txt of the EmuTOS sources as far as I can see.

You are right, this has been forgotten, and should be fixed.
Unless I'm plainly wrong and I invented that rule? By looking a the official name of EmuTOS 1.0, it seems that such rule actually exists.

--
Vincent Rivière



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