Thu, Feb 02, 2023 at 07:44:06PM CET, linus.luessing@c0d3.blue wrote:
On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 03:55:08PM +0100, Jiri Pirko wrote:
Fri, Jan 27, 2023 at 11:21:29AM CET, sw@simonwunderlich.de wrote:
This version will contain all the (major or even only minor) changes for Linux 6.3.
The version number isn't a semantic version number with major and minor information. It is just encoding the year of the expected publishing as Linux -rc1 and the number of published versions this year (starting at 0).
I wonder, what is this versioning good for?
The best reason in my opinion is that it's useful to convince ordinary people that they should update :-).
Usually when debugging reported issues one of the first things we ask users is to provide the output of "batctl -v":
$ batctl -v batctl debian-2023.0-1 [batman-adv: 2022.3]
Why kernel version is not enough for you? My point is, why to maintain internal driver version alongside with the kernel version?
I just don't see any point of having these parallel driver versions. Looks like a historical relict. IDK.
I'w just wondering, that's all.
If there is a very old year in there I think it's easier to tell and convince people to try again with newer versions and to update. And also as a developer I find it easier to (roughly) memorize when a feature was added by year than by kernel version number. So I know by heart that TVLVs were added in 2014 and multicast snooping patches and new multicast handling was added around 2019 for instance. But don't ask me which kernel version that was :D. I'd have to look that up. So if "batctl -v" displayed a kernel version number that would be less helpful for me. Also makes it easier for ordinary users to look up and compare their version with our news archive: https://www.open-mesh.org/projects/open-mesh/wiki/News-archive Also note that we can't do a simple kernel version to year notation mapping in userspace in batctl. OpenWrt uses the most recent Linux LTS release. But might feature a backport of a more recent batman-adv which is newer than the one this stable kernel would provide. Or people also often use Debian stable but compile and use the latest batman-adv version with it.
Yeah, for out of tree driver, have whatever.
Does that make sense?