[developers] Grammar versioning and release strategies

[Michael Wayne Goodman]

Hi (grammar) developers,

Francis, Emily, and I are trying to work out a reliable versioning scheme
and release workflow for Jacy, and we thought the conversation could be
useful for other grammar developers, so I'm bringing it to this list.

The problem is this: We work a bit on Jacy, then update Version.lsp and
make a release. Then we go find some more bugs and commit fixes in
preparation for the next release, but we've forgotten to change
Version.lsp, so now we have non-release states of the grammar with the same
version string as the previous release. This makes the grammar version
(which is stored, for example, in [incr tsdb()] profile runs) an unreliable
indicator of the state of the grammar.

The ERG has the version string 'ERG (trunk)' for the development branch,
and only uses real versions (e.g. 'ERG (1214)') for tagged releases. This
is a good tactic, as the user should expect that a 'trunk' version needs
more info (e.g. the SVN revision number) to accurately describe the state
of the grammar.

We're wondering if anyone has good strategies (implemented in software,
described in documentation, or otherwise) for ensuring accurate versions?

Thanks

-- 
Michael Wayne Goodman
Ph.D. Candidate, UW Linguistics
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