[mythtv-users] protocol version mismatch, what's the best solution?

[Richard Freeman]

Isaac Richards wrote:
> How exactly do you propose to deal with different package maintainers 
> packaging different bits of (unreleased, pulled from svn) code?  If I were 
> put out 0.20.1 right now from the fixes branch, that won't change the 
> situation at all.
> 

I'm guessing what he was thinking is that if ALL 0.20 branches in svn
used the same protocol, and that when a protocol-change is needed it got
tagged as a dev release then package maintainers would not use those
builds.  If 0.20 suffers from numerous bugs and a bugfix release is
needed it could be tagged 0.20.1 or 0.21.  Package maintainers should be
discouraged from pulling from SVN - rather there should be dot releases
more frequently for them to target.  At least, that was the impression I
got reading the thread.

Not sure if all that is really necessary, but it probably wouldn't hurt
to keep the protocol version identical in all non-internal-dev releases.

Sure, in an ideal world we run the same distro of linux on every one of
our boxes, but sometimes it is nice to be able to use different distros
on different boxes, and it would be nice if 0.20 on Fedora talked to
0.20 on Gentoo and 0.20 on Knoppmyth and 0.20 on Minimyth.  From the
user's standpoint they ARE using the same version - it is just that 0.20
describes about 75 different builds and counting...  :)

Maybe one solution is to loudly advertise the build number somewhere
prominent - so that users can see they're really running version
0.20.12857 and not 0.20.12856.  That and documenting what builds would
be ideal for distros to standardize on for interoperability...