Version string

[illwieckz]

Today I discovered that Debian is going to distribute our Crunch:

• https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/crunch-dxtc

That's nice!

But then comes the question of the version string.

That testing package use our tags like unvanquiqhed/0.56.2 for releases, which is very good.

Indeed, every-time we release the Unvanquished game, we also release the Dæmon game engine, and we also release the Crunch tool. And on every release we write this tag.

So yes, all those unvanquished/x.x.x tags are actual releases of crunch: those tags are applied on stabilized branch, that stabilization being done as part of the Unvanquished and Dæmon stabilization.

But the 0.56.2 version for a crunch package looks wrong. As said in the readme, the version is 1.04U, because it is based on 1.04 version on crunch, with U for Unity variant. And since 0.56.2 is smaller than 1.04U, this looks a bit weird.

So I suggest that “1.05U” be the major version. Crunch interfaces are stable, this will probably never change. But then we can concatenate a string. For example we can version it 1.05.xU were x is a number we increment everytime we do a new unvanquished/x.x.x release. So we would have tags like v1.05.42U or v1.05.138U.

As a side note, I may start building binaries for Crunch at some point. I will not do that on every Unvanquished release (too much work!), but from time to time I would build some binaries that would match the latest release tag at the time, and then such version string would be used for the tarballs as well.

Distributions like Debian wouldn't need to match the irregular cycle of me building (or not) Crunch, they only have to follow our unvanquished/x.x.x tagging rhythm, exactly like the work-in-progress Debian crunch package already does.

[illwieckz]

Also since the release cycle is the one of Unvanquished and follows unvanquished/0.56.2 tags, the package could just use a version string like 1.05.0.56.2U or 1.05U0.56.2. It looks a bit cryptic though.

[slipher]

Well this release for every Unvanquished release scheme seems not so great for packagers since it would create unnecessary work by adding new versions even when there are no significant changes. Like even if only the README was changed there will be a new tag.

Also since the release cycle is the one of Unvanquished and follows unvanquished/0.56.2 tags, the package could just use a version string like 1.05.0.56.2U or 1.05U0.56.2. It looks a bit cryptic though.

It looks like the U is for Unvanquished 😛

[illwieckz]

Well this release for every Unvanquished release scheme seems not so great for packagers since it would create unnecessary work by adding new versions even when there are no significant changes. Like even if only the README was changed there will be a new tag.

On the other hand, it makes sense to repackage when the man page changes. And if a package ships the README to be provided in /usr/share/doc, then it also makes sense to upgrade the package. The things that will likely never affect a package are the CI stuff. But well, we can live with that.

[illwieckz]

Also since the release cycle is the one of Unvanquished and follows unvanquished/0.56.2 tags, the package could just use a version string like 1.05.0.56.2U or 1.05U0.56.2. It looks a bit cryptic though.

It looks like the U is for Unvanquished 😛

We can also be bold and go the 3.0 way.

Why 3? Because some people already been bold at naming their crunch “Crunch 2”:

• https://github.com/FrozenStormInteractive/Crunch2

But that “Crunch 2” is based on a code older than Unity's crunch…

Binomial Crunch 1.04
 ↓            ↓
 ↓            FrozenStorm Crunch 2
 ↓
Unity Crunch 1.04 (U)
 ↓
Dæmon Crunch 1.04U

[illwieckz]

If we go the Crunch 3 way, we would just increment the next number: 3.0, 3.1, 3.54, 3.127, 3.1337…