[graalvm-dev] Mandrel versioning scheme

[Foivos Zakkak]

Hello all,

I would like to bring to your attention an issue that came up regarding
the versioning scheme of Mandrel.

Based on the graalvm roadmap [1] (which appears to be outdated per [2])
the Mandrel team initially decided to follow the following version scheme:

YY.X.Z.W where YY.X.Z would be the graalVM CE version that Mandrel
YY.X.Z.W is based on, and W would be an incremental number for patches
on the Mandrel side (including backports, bug fixes, features, etc.).
So 20.1.0.3 would be based on GraalVM 20.1.0 CE, 20.1.1.2 would be based
on GraalVM 20.1.1 CE etc.

However, according to the new roadmap [2] there will be no YY.0.1,
YY.1.1, and YY.2.1 CE releases only YY.0 YY.1 YY.2 and YY.3.0-3.
In the old roadmap [1], YY.Z.1 releases were meant to be CPU releases
(aligned with openJDK CPU releases), but in the new roadmap CPU patches
will appear in the next Minor Feature Release (e.g. in 20.2 instead of
20.1.1).

The mandrel team would like to keep its CPU releases as close as
possible to the openJDK CPU releases, thus it would like to stay closer
to the old roadmap.
As a result a new mandrel release is expected to come out with each
openJDK CPU release (or a few days later).
This mandrel release will be based on the latest mandrel release (which
will probably be aligned with the latest GraalVM CE release).

So at this point we have a CPU release candidate that is based on
Mandrel 20.1.0.0 which in turn is based on GraalVM 20.1.0 CE.
The question is how should this Mandrel release be tagged? 20.1.0.1 or
20.1.1.0 or something else?

20.1.0.1 makes clear that the release is based on GraalVM 20.1.0 CE and
there is no chance of anyone relating it to GraalVM 20.1.1 EE.
On the other hand if we have multiple releases e.g., 20.1.0.0, 20.1.0.1,
20.1.0.2, and 20.1.0.3 there is no way to tell which of them arre CPU
releases.

20.1.1.0 makes clear that this is a CPU release but people might be
confused regarding its relationship to GraalVM 20.1.1 EE.
Another issue with this scheme is that Mandrel will probably release
20.3.1 before GraalVM CE 20.3.1 so there might be some confusion there
as well.

What are your thoughts?

Regards,
Foivos

[1] https://www.graalvm.org/docs/release-notes/version-roadmap/
[2] https://graalvm.slack.com/archives/CNBFR78F9/p1594804615255100


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