[petsc-dev] release naming scheme

[Satish Balay]

On Sat, 11 May 2013, Jed Brown wrote:

> Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> writes:
> 
> >> What is the utility of PETSC_VERSION_PATCH_DATE?
> >
> > In the current scheme we have: [for each petsc-3.3-pX tarball]
> >
> > PETSC_VERSION_DATE: date of the primary release [i.e when the first 3.3 tarball was spun]
> > PETSC_VERSION_PATCH_DATE: date of the patched tarball release [i.e when 3.3-pX was spun]
> >
> > And we use PETSC_VERSION_DATE [manually transcribed] in a bunch of
> > places.
> >
> > - https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/
> > "The current version of PETSc is 3.3; released June 5, 2012"
> >
> > - https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/documentation/changes/index.html
> >
> > - manual
> >
> > But PETSC_VERSION_PATCH_DATE: is the date the tarball is respun [with
> > patches] - and that doesn't change the above docs.
> 
> How is this information useful?  Would it be simple enough to "release"
> the manual once per feature release (3.4, 3.5, ...) so that it's date
> would not need to be updated every maintenance (subminor) release and
> then PETSC_VERSION_DATE would always reflect the date of the last
> release?
> 
> We could stop hard-coding these values and switch to obtaining them from
> Git, in which case releasing would just involve tagging and spinning the
> tarballs, but that automation can wait.

Right now PETSC_VERSION_PATCH_DATE is automatically set when the
tarball is spun. [And we also have PETSC_VERSION_DATE_GIT - primarily
for configure.log]

So your suggestion is to remove PETSC_VERSION_PATCH_DATE - and set
PETSC_VERSION_DATE [automatically during tarball creation]

Also - I see petscnagupgrade.py checks
http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-dev/include/petscversion.h for
latest release version info. So for the old versions [of petsc
petscnagupgrade.py] to work - we'll have to retain PETSC_VERSION_PATCH
[as you suggested]

BTW: before switching the scripts to handle the new version naming - I
created petsc-3.3-p7 tarballs with the current outstanding patches in
the maint branch [via balay/maint-3.3-p7 branch]. If its ok - it can
be merged into maint/master.

ftp://ftp.mcs.anl.gov/pub/petsc/release-snapshots/petsc-3.3-p7.tar.gz
[web page isn't updated though]

Satish