What's up with dev in the version number?

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

    <meta name="generator" content="Discourse 3.2.0.beta1-dev - https://github.com/discourse/discourse version 20481abefcd025fec5f7c586aacc9354bdad94ec">

Version now has dev appended. Is this on purpose?

[Bas (Bas van Leeuwen)]

It is on purpose

But we should probably explain the reasoning behind it, somewhere in the near future…

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

I think it broke my code that compared version numbers to decide whether to run a bootstrap, but I haven’t had time to figure out exactly how.

[david (David Taylor)]

Here’s a summary of the changes:

From Discourse 3.2: adding -dev suffix to beta versions under active development

On tests-passed, starting with 3.2.0.beta1-dev, Discourse core version numbers will include a -dev suffix to indicate that they’re not the final ‘release’ versions of a beta. This suffix doesn’t appear in the UI, so this is a technicality which will have no impact on the vast majority of people. For the technical details, see below: In the beta series for Discourse 3.1 and below, our versioning strategy was to ‘release’ a beta, and then leave the version number in tests-passed exactly the sam…

@pfaffman

I think it broke my code

These new version numbers are still valid semver, and are parseable by Gem::Version.new, so that’s the best way to compare them.

If you were trying to parse version.rb manually, then the relevant change might be this one which restructured the file to support this new suffix.

If you can share the relevant code, then I’m sure we can help to figure it out.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

@david

If you can share the relevant code, then I’m sure we can help to figure it out.

Thanks! I"m not sure yet if it’s the Ansible code that compares the versions or my code that retrieves it. I suspect it’s my code and it’s a problem of my own making.

For the reasons that the -dev got added, I suspect that I should be checking for a commit hash and then figuring out whether to upgrade based on that.