[OE-core] No versioning for existing images

[Laszlo Papp]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 3:15 PM, Martin Jansa <martin.jansa at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 03:51:19PM +0100, Anders Darander wrote:
>> * Laszlo Papp <lpapp at kde.org> [140224 15:12]:
>>
>> > On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 1:58 PM, Anders Darander <anders at chargestorm.se> wrote:
>> > > * Laszlo Papp <lpapp at kde.org> [140224 14:37]:
>>
>> > >> 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:
>> > >> 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?
>>
>> > > The git describe line is our main versioning. Using that line we get the
>> > > abreviated SHA1 of our repo, the last tag, the number of commits after
>> > > the last tag, and finally whether the repo was clean or dirty during the
>> > > build.
>>
>>
>> > > It might not be as pretty as the 10.0.10.738 in your example, though for
>> > > us it's sufficient for the time being.
>>
>> > As you are writing, that is good for internal operation, but I would
>> > dislike providing such "versioning" for customers.
>>
>> Yes, for customer communication it might very well be preferred to use
>> some other version numbers.
>>
>> I'd guess that the best bet then would be to either store the version
>> number in a config file in your repo, and have the build process take
>> that number and put it into the image in a way similar to what's above.
>> Or to get the number from a tag. In either case, you'll need to make
>> sure that the release process updates the number correctly, thought that
>> issue will be there no matter how you retreive and store the number.
>>
>> Though, I still think that having the info above on the images are
>> usefull, not least when the customer comes back with more difficult to
>> isolate issues.
>
> in meta-webos we're appending human readable version suffix to
> IMAGE_NAME, KERNEL_IMAGE_BASE_NAME and MODULE_IMAGE_BASE_NAME variables
> and it's also included in some utils (like lsb and nyx-modules).
>
> That way we can distinguish not only what is in the image, but also
> where the image was built (e.g. official/local build,
> development/production version, which jenkins-job produced that etc).

Right, this sounds well-organized and advanced. Currently, we do not
need this much flexibility, but it is useful to know there are people
doing it as "professionally" as you. :-)