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Guidelines and HOWTOs/Application Versioning

From KDE Community Wiki

Every application has an application version number that regularly has to be increased to distinguish different versions of the application (e.g. features, bug fixes). Not using different version numbers for different releases can lead to a confusing About dialog and lower the quality of the bugs reported, as it will not be clear which version is affected. When an application does not have its own release schedule but is released with KDE Applications, it can use the version number of the corresponding KDE Applications release.

It is the maintainer's duty to take care of increasing the version number regularly for every release. Specifically, there are two possible ways to do that:

  1. Increase the version number by hand for each new release.
  2. Use the same version number as KDE Applications and let the release script update the version number.

In the following, we explain how to use the scripted version numbers from KDE Applications within an application. The release scripts will auto-update the following CMake variables in the toplevel CMakeLists.txt of all applications bundled in the KDE Applications release: 

# KDE Application Version, managed by release script
set (KDE_APPLICATIONS_VERSION_MAJOR "15")
set (KDE_APPLICATIONS_VERSION_MINOR "04")
set (KDE_APPLICATIONS_VERSION_MICRO "0")

You can then use them to define the version for your own application based on this.

For example Kate defines in its CMakeLists.txt: 

set (KDE_APPLICATIONS_VERSION "${KDE_APPLICATIONS_VERSION_MAJOR}.${KDE_APPLICATIONS_VERSION_MINOR}.${KDE_APPLICATIONS_VERSION_MICRO}")

and then use this in the config.h.cmake: 

#define KATE_VERSION "${KDE_APPLICATIONS_VERSION}"

This is then passed to the KAboutData: 

   /**
    * construct about data for Kate
    */
   KAboutData aboutData(QStringLiteral("kate"), i18n("Kate"), QStringLiteral(KATE_VERSION),
                        i18n("Kate - Advanced Text Editor"), KAboutLicense::LGPL_V2,
                        i18n("(c) 2000-2014 The Kate Authors"), QString(), QStringLiteral("http://kate-editor.org"));

Beside using the full version, you could use only the patch release version ${KDE_APPLICATIONS_VERSION_MICRO} to suffix your own version if you don't want to do that manually for each patch release.

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