linux-kernel - Re: Linux 2.6.32-rc3

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Date:	Tue, 6 Oct 2009 20:23:31 -0700 (PDT)
From:	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
To:	Dave Airlie <airlied@...il.com>
cc:	Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>,
	Dirk Hohndel <hohndel@...radead.org>,
	Len Brown <lenb@...nel.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Linux 2.6.32-rc3

On Wed, 7 Oct 2009, Dave Airlie wrote:
> 
> Why don't you just have the kernel version Linux-commitid?

That's actually what I personally do 99% of the time. And, in fact, it's 
how CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO effectively works. It's very useful for doing 
things like

	gitk v$(uname -r)..

which really does work (well, apart from the "-dirty" case when I've 
compiled a dirty kernel that has something that isn't committed). Try it. 
It's a great way to see "what do I have in my current tree that I'm not 
actually running".

So with CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO, you can largely pretend that you really 
only have the git SHA1. The rest is "fluff" for people.

> why keep up the pretense that the 2.6.xx bit means anything outside of release?

Agreed. However, it _does_ mean something for releases.

And that is really how you should think of it. I update the kernel 
Makefile for releases, and nothing else. If you compile a non-release 
kernel, the version is meaningless - unless you have 
CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO.

> You could just have the tarball generation scripts make it into a 2.6.31 but
> for everyone else we never see it.

Well, about a year ago I actually considered generating the version 
entirely from the tags in the git tree, and do it entirely that way. 

The reason I didn't is that even if it only makes sense for releases, it 
is (a) tradition and (b) useful without (or across) SCM's and (c) human- 
readable. In fact, I tend to like seeing things like

	Linux version 2.6.32-rc2-00351-g58e57fb

in my dmesg outputs, because it does mean something _outside_ of just the 
pure "git version" (the '58e57fb' part is sufficient as far as git is 
concerned). It does have a very human-readable component to it: it's 351 
commits after 2.6.32-rc2.

So I literally think that our current CONFIG_LOCALVERSION_AUTO includes 
the best of both worlds. It has the "uniquely identifying" part, but it 
also has a part that is human-readable and useful for that reason.

			Linus
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