[syslinux] Module Versioning

[BALATON Zoltan]

On Tue, 8 Mar 2016, Ady via Syslinux wrote:
> Although these points can be an interesting discussion for some
> participants, I am going to respectfully request to go back to the main
> point in this email thread: improving the version identification in
> Syslinux's binaries, including modules.

Yes, sorry for distracting the thread. I just wanted to understand the 
problem and got many unrelated questions along the way.

> level of knowledge, skills... My experience with helping other users,
> distros and my own beta-testing as common user suggest that the need
> for a better versioning identification is not limited to release and
> pre-release (as others have suggested in this email thread).
>
> Unless there is a clear "standardize", methodical way to add a clear
> "version" identification to Syslinux's binaries (including for distros,
> with patches), I am not going to consider the matter really solved
> (other might not care, or might be pleased with less than that). I
> should know it, as I am the one actually encountering this type of
> problems while testing as _common user_ and helping solve the mismatch
> version problems.

I think the problem is probably that you are trying to use the relase 
version as interface version which it is not. (Think about library 
versioning where the software package has a high level version and the 
library itself has an interface version that should change whenever the 
API changes unrelated to the software release version.) We probably don't 
have an interface version for modules at the moment. I don't know how to 
solve this best but dynamic link libraries and Linux kernel modules might 
have solutions for this problem that could be considered.

Also to identify every change, the lowest level would be a commit hash but 
that's probably too low level. It's still a problem though if a distro 
patches a syslinux version without changing the version which we can't 
control so this may not be completely solved to your definition.

Regards,
BALATON Zoltan