[ntp:hackers] hackers] NTP software numbering

Harlan Stenn stenn at ntp.org
Thu Dec 25 02:58:17 UTC 2014


Hal Murray writes:
> 
> stenn at ntp.org said:
> > We're talking about changing from:
> >  ntpd 4.2.8p1-beta1 at 1.3268-o Wed Dec 24 21:02:52 UTC 2014 (2)
> > to:
> >  ntpd 4 v2.8.1-beta1 at 1.3268-o Wed Dec 24 21:02:52 UTC 2014 (2) 
> 
> Does anybody but a geek care what the protocol version is?

No, but...

> My vote would be to drop the protocol from the package/tar name.  That
> leaves you with major/minor/whatever to use as is convenient.  There
> is a tradition of distros sometimes adding their own patches so
> whatever you do should leave room for that.
> 
> I don't care much about the details of the version string that
> programs print out.
> 
> If/when we ever change the protocol in a way that matters we can
> revisit the issue.

I can see ntpv5 beginning work pretty soon...

I can also see that we still need to make sure a V5 ntpd instance speaks
V4 protocol very well.  There will be protocol data structure
differences here, so it will be pretty easy to detect when we do
something wrong.

So in this case, given we want "newer" versions to have bigger numbers,
it would still work to leave the package name as "ntp" and have the
version be "PROTO.RELEASE.POINT".  I'm still not convinced we make
enough changes to need Major and Minor release numbers.

And if we drop the PROTO from the first position, I'm not sure we gain
anything because we have to be able to compare version numbers anyway
(old, existing, and new).  It's not like we can easily use a number that
is less than 4, using 4.X is tricky, and if we decide to bump to 5 while
on protocol 4 that seems to me to be confusing to anybody who knows
what's going on.

And we're still back to the question of "do we need major and minor
releases anyway?"  I'm still expecting us to keep issuing a point (tiny)
release with each dev roll, and doing what we've always done with
-stable releases (have -betaN and -RCn suffixes so we don't "churn"
-stable point releases too often).

I'm also expecting to not have any -dev releases until sometime in
January, which gives us at least 2 weeks' time to figure this out.

And it is a Holiday season and I don't expect many people to look at
this.  And I bet a bunch of folks will think about it, and that's
probably more important.

https://support.ntp.org/bin/view/Dev/ReleaseNumberingSchemeDiscussion 
has been updated with some of the above information.

H


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