[darwinbuild-dev] Project Version Numbers

[Kevin Van Vechten]

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