[OE-core] No versioning for existing images

[Laszlo Papp]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 1:18 PM, Burton, Ross <ross.burton at intel.com> wrote:
> On 24 February 2014 12:01, Laszlo Papp <lpapp at kde.org> wrote:
>> For instance, the MeeGo Nokia phone had a software version information
>> in the settings, and that is something I would personally consider as
>> the image version, but again, there might be better ways. Please share
>> good practices in here., or alternatively, feel free to point me to
>> any documentation, examples, etc.
>
> This is an interesting example and a useful demonstration of why the
> image version isn't always that useful.

I am not sure about that; see below.

> The software build number
> covers *everything* that goes into the image, but the image version
> number is just the version of the top-level image recipe.

The problem is that build numbers, that I have seen at least, are
human unreadable. A human readable number would be nicer to have;
something that I have just double checked on my Blackberry Limited
Edition phone, and it is so that the OS Version is 10.0.10.738 in the
settings.

Perhaps the build number can be made human readable... but currently,
when I build an image, all I get is a long and not so convenient
time-stamp. Is there a more gentle way of generating image version
then?

> If you bump
> the version of eglibc your image version won't be increased.

Yes, but see above.

> There's nothing to stop you doing versioned images but as the version
> doesn't represent anything beyond the image recipe version it's not as
> useful as you'd think.

Perhaps the image version is not the right way to address this issue;
there might be other way, but it is still an important question for
embedded system creators because I have seen that at several clients,
and also on phones, that the software is shipped in one piece. I
rarely see that individual packages are sent for a software upgrade. I
rather see an incremental software update provided to the customers
out there.

The good example for this is the phones, tablets, etc (at least
mine)... but there might be other examples, too.

I would like to figure out a convenient and shared way or more of them
how to deal with this generic issue. It is not vendor specific, I
think.