$Id: version-spec.txt 17407 2008-11-29 12:04:17Z arma $

                        HOW TOR VERSION NUMBERS WORK

1. The Old Way

 Before 0.1.0, versions were of the format:
     MAJOR.MINOR.MICRO(status(PATCHLEVEL))?(-cvs)?
 where MAJOR, MINOR, MICRO, and PATCHLEVEL are numbers, status is one
 of "pre" (for an alpha release), "rc" (for a release candidate), or
 "." for a release.  As a special case, "a.b.c" was equivalent to
 "a.b.c.0".  We compare the elements in order (major, minor, micro,
 status, patchlevel, cvs), with "cvs" preceding non-cvs.

 We would start each development branch with a final version in mind:
 say, "0.0.8".  Our first pre-release would be "0.0.8pre1", followed by
 (for example) "0.0.8pre2-cvs", "0.0.8pre2", "0.0.8pre3-cvs",
 "0.0.8rc1", "0.0.8rc2-cvs", and "0.0.8rc2".  Finally, we'd release
 0.0.8.  The stable CVS branch would then be versioned "0.0.8.1-cvs",
 and any eventual bugfix release would be "0.0.8.1".

2. The New Way

 After 0.1.0, versions are of the format:
    MAJOR.MINOR.MICRO(.PATCHLEVEL)(-status_tag)
 The stuff in parentheses is optional.  As before, MAJOR, MINOR, MICRO,
 and PATCHLEVEL are numbers, with an absent number equivalent to 0.
 All versions should be distinguishable purely by those four
 numbers. The status tag is purely informational, and lets you know how
 stable we think the release is: "alpha" is pretty unstable; "rc" is a
 release candidate; and no tag at all means that we have a final
 release. If the tag ends with "-cvs" or "-dev", you're looking at a
 development snapshot that came after a given release.  If we *do*
 encounter two versions that differ only by status tag, we compare them
 lexically.

 Now, we start each development branch with (say) 0.1.1.1-alpha.  The
 patchlevel increments consistently as the status tag changes, for
 example, as in: 0.1.1.2-alpha, 0.1.1.3-alpha, 0.1.1.4-rc, 0.1.1.5-rc.
 Eventually, we release 0.1.1.6.  The next patch release is 0.1.1.7.

 Between these releases, CVS is versioned with a -cvs tag: after
 0.1.1.1-alpha comes 0.1.1.1-alpha-cvs, and so on. But starting with
 0.1.2.1-alpha-dev, we switched to SVN and started using the "-dev"
 suffix instead of the "-cvs" suffix.
