Re: Linux 3.0-rc3

[Denys Vlasenko <vda.linux@googlemail.com>]

On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 1:01 AM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> .. and this time even with a timely tar-ball, since I'm not traveling any more.
>
> What do we have in it? More than in -rc2. I'm clearly not the only one
> who was in Japan for LinuxCon, or something else just made people wake
> up.

Linus, I know I run a risk of being not the first person to ask this,
but anyway.

I've got a patch for my project to fix parsing of kernel version which
has only two numbers. Basically,

- scanf(ver, "%u.%u.%u", &a, &b, &c)
+ sscanf(ver, "%u.%u", &a, &b)

I can take it, but it made me thinking: how many other projects
will be similarly affected? Must be hundreds, even thousands.

I propose to still use three digits. I mean, if you want to use
3.0, 3.1, 3.2 numbering for your releases and leave third digit
for stable series, just number them 3.0.0, 3.1.0, 3.2.0 instead.

This way, many userspace projects will need less patching
in order to work with 3.x. In many cases, they can
avoid patching altogether.

-- 
vda