Re: Considering a version 8 at some point...

On 6/30/20 11:48 AM, Daniel Stenberg via curl-library wrote:
> Hi friends,
>
> I've mentioned before that I'd like to see us move on to version 8
> before the minor number reaches 100 to avoid confusions. I think we're
> at too large numbers now - they get hard to remember and are easily
> mixed up.
>
> curl version 7.1 was released on August 7 2000 and we've stuck to
> version 7 ever since. I wanted to stick to version 7 for as long as we
> remained API compatable - even if we ignored a few chances to bump the
> number when we bumped the SONAME a few times in the early 2000s.
>
> In October 2006 we shipped curl 7.16.0 and we haven't bumped the major
> SONAME number since. My strong hope is that we never will again.
>
> So, I think we need to consider doing a version 8 release without an
> SONAME bump. I think we should just do it at some point, without putting
> many requirements of any new bells or whistles. Similar to how the Linux
> kernel does it, if you will.
>
> My current thinking, as I mentioned in some release video recently, is
> that we make our 200th release version 8.0. Not because it actually
> means anything, but because it gives us something to aim at. And its a
> fine, even and aligned number.
>
> The release coming tomorrow is going to become version 7.71.1 and is our
> 193rd release since the beginning. If we go to version 8.0 on release
> 200, it means only 6 more release in the version 7 series and if we
> manage to do full release cycles (which is probably a bit optimistic) we
> could perhaps be at version 8.0 in a little less than a year from now.
> With a few short release cycles added to the mix, maybe already in the
> early 2021.
>
> What do you think?
>

In all systems I have I see SONAME is "libcurl.so.4" wherein I see that
there is a symlink from /usr/local/lib/libcurl.so.4 to libcurl.so.4.6.0.
Wonderful. In the past I see that we had :

     Mar 21 2015 libcurl.so.4.3.0
     Jan 9 2017 libcurl.so.4.4.0
     Jul 30 2019 libcurl.so.4.5.0

Also wonderful.

Perhaps it may be reasonable to pull a Microsoft type trick here and do
a jump from libcurl.so.4.6.0 upwards to libcurl.so.4.8.0 for the ver 8.0
release merely following your notion of perfect clean numbers. Which I
fully agree with. Then we would see no change in the SONAME but we will
a nice "8.0" in the actual libcurl lib file name. Seems elegant.

-- 
Dennis Clarke
RISC-V/SPARC/PPC/ARM/CISC
UNIX and Linux spoken
GreyBeard and suspenders optional
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