Every time we do a security/bug fix release combo-pak like we did at http://drupal.org/drupal-7.2, there are inevitable questions that arise about why on earth we do two releases, rather than one. Some example questions include, "Which version should I upgrade to?" as well as "Was 7.1 a mistake?" and of course the classic "Uh. WTF?"

(The reason this is done, btw, is because 7.1 is a security fix only release, 7.2 includes all bug fixes pushed to the branch as well as the security fixes. It's to help people update their core/modules faster without being terrified they're going to destroy something. There are lots of external systems that use these version numbers, including Update Status, localize.drupal.org, Drush, etc. which is why we went this route rather than something more self-documenting like a "7.0-security" release.)

A seemingly simple way to solve this would be to allow version numbers like 7.0.1 in addition to version numbers like 7.1. version_compare() would still work, and it would be more visually obvious what was happening, and similar to what other projects do.

I'm not sure how much work this is, or if this is a duplicate of an existing issue (I did try and find one but was unsuccessful), but wanted to throw this out there for discussion, anyway.

Comments

jbrauer’s picture

jbrauer commented

+1 ... also not sure how much work this is but it would be excellent.

The one other case that this covers better is the rare case where we have more than one security update between bug-fixes. Especially if bug-fixes move towards a schedule which seems likely in http://groups.drupal.org/node/150854 ... this could allow for 7.0.1 and 7.0.2 which would both be security fixes on 7.0.

fuzzy76’s picture

fuzzy76 commented

+1 and subscribing :)

franz’s picture

franz
any
Location Montréal
commented

I agree, this sounds great.

dww’s picture

dww
we/he/they
commented
Category: feature » support
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

project_release can already handle this. We used to have 3 digits for core (e.g. 4.7.5).

However, I'm not at all convinced we want to configure it this way on d.o again. And, I wouldn't be surprised if update (status|manager) doesn't handle this properly.

Plus, everyone who's saying "semantic versions FTW!" either doesn't understand the semantics that semantic versioning are trying to maintain, or they don't understand what we're talking about using these 3 digits for. I'm also completely unconvinced that if we re-introduce 3 digits it's going to be any more understandable than what we have now.

Anyway, I'm exhausted and almost completely out of time before going offline for a few weeks, so I can't really provide a more coherent and useful reply on the wider questions (e.g. at http://groups.drupal.org/node/152484), but I'm closing this feature request out since project_release itself supports this kind of thing.