On 16.10.2008 02:25, Greg KH wrote:You brought this topic up a few months ago, and passed it off as
something we would discuss at the kernel summit. But that never
happened, so I figured I'd bring it up again here.
So, as someone who constantly is dealing with kernel version numbers all
the time with the -stable trees, our current numbering scheme is a pain
a times. How about this proposal instead?
We number the kernel based on the year, and the numbers of releases we
have done this year:
YEAR.NUMBER.MINOR_RELEASE
For example, the first release in 2009 would be called:
2009.0.0
The second:
2009.1.0
[...]
That afaics has one minor downside: You don't know in advance how the next kernel is going to be called. Example: the kernel that is currently developed could become 2008.4 (the fifth kernel in 2008) if this development cycle in the end is one of the quicker ones and gets finished this year. But if everything is a bit slower then it might become 2009.0 (the first one in 2009).
Hence people that write a lot of articles about things that happen in linux land (like LWN.net or I do) would be forced to write sentences like "[...]the kernel that will become 2008.3 or 2009.0 will have feature foo that works like this[...]". That will get really confusing if you read those articles half a year later -- especially if that kernel became 2008.3 in the end, because foo in 2009.0 might already look quite different again...