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

[Thomas Huth <th.huth@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 03/10/2020 14.00, Vincent Rivière wrote:
> 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).

IMHO it's only simpler as long as you never do a bugfix release. If there 
are bugfix releases, it looks more confusing to me.

> > 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?

Yes. At least I'm always annoyed if I have to look at e.g. overcrowded FTP 
directory listings and the files appear in the wrong order there.

> > 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.

Well, certainly not on purpose, but if you hardly do any bugfix releases, 
you would initially not notice that the emulator can't print the third 
digit, in case a lazy emulator developer might simply has forgotten to add it.

> > 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.

We already had EmuTOS 0.9.0 in the past. So I don't think that was a clearly 
defined rule so far.

 Thomas