openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Alexandre Fayolle <alexandre.fayolle@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone,

I would like feedback from the community about the version numbering of
addons.

When working with openerp modules, it is important to know if upgrading
an instance to a new version of the module requires to do the "update
module" dance (either from the command line of the server or from the
web interface). There is currently no clear way of doing this
automatically, as far as I know. However, if we want to build such tool,
we need information about which modules need updating. One such way is
by using the version number in __openerp__.py.

So it becomes necessary to increment that version number when changes
are made in the module which require an upgrade to be performed when the
module is installed. Such changes include:

* adding a new model (or a new model specialisation)
* changing the column definitions of a model
* modifying data files (views, security rules...)

I'm not sure about the status of translation files.

The version numbering scheme I'm used to uses three numbers a.b.c

* a is incremented in case of a major rewrite of the module
* b is incremented when new features are added
* c is incremented when bugs are fixed

I'm fairly open to different numbering schemes, and won't argue about
this. But I'm pretty certain that making sure that the version is
changed when the module requires an explicit upgrade will ease
maintenance for anyone in charge of OpenERP instances with community
modules installed.

What do you think about this?

If there is a consensus that this is useful, the next steps are:

* build a module which helps upgrading the modules with an more recent
on-disk version than the one in database
* remind people that they've forgotten to increment the version number
during code reviews for MP going to the 6.1 or 7.0 branches of the
community projects

-- 
Alexandre Fayolle
Chef de Projet
Tel : + 33 (0)4 79 26 57 94

Camptocamp France SAS
Savoie Technolac, BP 352
73377 Le Bourget du Lac Cedex
http://www.camptocamp.com