[Haskell-cafe] Changing version numbering schemes for HackageDB packages?

[Antoine Latter]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 10:20 PM, wren ng thornton <wren at freegeek.org> wrote:
>
> For projects which are released very frequently (i.e. on the order of daily)
> or very infrequently (e.g. semiannually, annually) then date-based releases
> can make sense. However, the releases do need to be quite regular on either
> of those time scales. This style is also appropriate for projects which
> exist in-time with our non-code world.
>
> Often though, projects see sporadic flurries of improvements and so
> something that's been languishing for months can quickly make a couple
> bugfix releases followed by a backwards-incompatible rewrite in the same
> week, only to languish for a while afterwards. With this sort of release
> pattern, date-based versions make no sense whatsoever since the calendar
> makes rather arbitrary cliffs in the topology.
>
> For most projects the Major.Minor.Bug style seems to work better, but I have
> seen projects where the YYYY.MM.DD style is more appropriate.
>

I went with the Major.Minor.YYYY.MM.DD because I'm too lazy to
increment bug-fix version numbers, and the code I have building the
.cabal file already knows today's date.

I guess that approach doesn't work too well if you're not machine
generating your .cabal file, or if you expect more than one bug-fix
release per day.

-Antoine