On Jan 8, 2008, at 6:53 PM, Michael Franz wrote:

After working with the diff plugin of darwinxref I notices that some project version numbers decrease. Is this normal?

I'm not sure that it's "normal," but it's not necessarily "wrong" either. A few observations below:

Did Apple really go to an older release when they upgraded the OS?

Although a specific project source version was built for an update, it might not have been included in the update. This should be obvious, as the typical ~100MB of an update is clearly a small subset of the ~10GB Mac OS X install.

An example is between build 8I127 and 8I1119.

AppleFileSystemDriver differs: 7 vs 5 There are others, but this illustrates the question.

Because 8I127 is for PowerPC and 8I1119 is for Intel, it's not really possible to say which is "newer." They're each releases on a different branch of development. (Note that in Leopard, there is a single universal build instead of a separate PowerPC and Intel build.) It's possible that AppleFileSystemDriver-7 contains no changes relevant to one of the platforms, so there was no compelling reason to build the changes there.

So, can we assume that hiring version numbers are newer projects?

This is generally true.

Are these mistakes in the plists?

It's a possibility, though probably not in this case. - Kevin