[Insight-developers] ITK version numbers

[Brad King]

On 12/19/2011 3:04 PM, Matt McCormick wrote:
> How about
>
>    major.minor.patch.tweak
>
> Where tweak is "0" for a release (edited by a commit), and a YYYYMMDD
> time stamp otherwise.

This is CMake's approach exactly.  We've never actually done a "tweak"
release beyond 0 since switching to this scheme but the version number
has room for it.

 > This way can have easy version comparisons and patch releases.

I'm not sure it works for ITK's model.  In ITK we do lots of development
in master and occasionally update older releases with new patch levels.
The patch number on old release branches that gets updated for fixes
must be in the same component as the date on master.  In other words,
if we have a branch for "4.0.x" then the date stamp on master needs
to be in the ".x" component.  If the latest release is 4.0.0 then
the version on master should be "4.0.$date".  If we port a fix back
to the release then we create "4.0.1" as the patch release.

With ITK's historical release behavior I think the scheme

   major.minor.<patch|date>

makes the most sense if we use the date at all.

-Brad