[sane-devel] Changing versioning scheme (1.1.0, 1.2.0, 1.3.0 instead of 1.0.33, 1.0.34, 1.0.35)

[Povilas Kanapickas]

Hello,

The current versioning scheme does not allow proper bugfix releases of
SANE backends. That is, only 3 components in the version are supported
properly in the build scripts and elsewhere. For example version codes
for 1.0.33.1 would be identical to 1.0.33. Version codes are the only
thing that I found, there are likely other problems because people
writing code did not expect a 4-component version.

The above is bad, because e.g. if we release 1.0.33 and notice a serious
problem, we can't release a bugfix without risking breakage in various
places even if it's a single line change.

Fixing all the code that expects 3-component version is probably not
good use of the time we have.

Therefore I propose we switch to increasing the second version component
instead of the third for future releases of SANE. E.g. instead of
1.0.35, 1.0.36 and 1.0.37 we will have 1.2.0, 1.3.0 and 1.4.0 releases.
This way we would have the third version component reserved for bugfix
releases.

I also propose to apply the proposal to the upcoming 1.0.33 release and
use 1.1.0 version for it.

Please let me know what you think.

Regards,
Povilas