Please End the Version Confusion

[laktak]

I just encountered a bug that appears to be fixed in 2.1 - I only wanted to verify what version of dotnet core I'm using and to check what's the latest version.

My dotnet --version says 2.1.4 but then I found your incredibly confusing release notes:

.NET Core 2.1
Release Date 	Description 	Release Notes 	
2018/02/27 	2.0.1-Preview1 with SDK 2.0.1-Preview1 	release notes 	download
.NET Core 2.0
Release Date 	Description 	Release Notes 	
2018/01/09 	2.0.5 with SDK 2.1.4 	release notes 	download

So 2.0.1-Preview1 comes after 2.0.5? And SDK 2.0.1-Preview1 comes after 2.1.4? So I probably have 2.0.5?

You said you wanted to simplify this (but that was a few months ago) - so here are some suggestions:

• use semver
• please drop the preview labels
• use even/odd version numbers for release/beta versions
• align core and sdk versions
• make it easier to find out what's installed

[svick]

Some of this is being changed for upcoming versions of .Net Core, see dotnet/designs#29 and specifically this document.

[Petermarcu]

We have done the alignment of SDK and Core and done work to enable enumeration of whats installed and in view of the SDK and runtime. @laktak, do you have any feedback based on the planned results here? If not, we can probably close this issue because this is already and area that is tracked in other issues.

[laktak]

@Petermarcu the document does not mention it but the preview labels are gone? How are beta's versioned?

Will dotnet --version give me both the SDK and Runtime version (or how do I find out the runtime version)?

Do you know when will this be implemented?

[Petermarcu]

This is all being implemented in the .NET Core 2.1.300 SDK. dotnet --version will only give you the sdk version because thats why it was added initially and people use it expecting a single value that is the sdk version. There were discussions about deprecating that switch and providing things like dotnet --version sdk so you can request a specific version. I'm going to move this issue to the core-setup repo where @steveharter can comment more on exact details of the changes and when they will be merged in.

[Petermarcu]

Issue moved to dotnet/core-setup #3816 via ZenHub