What is the purpose of the "version" tag in the top level software entity?

[amrb...@gmail.com]

Hello all,

Looking at some of the sample sw-description files in the documentation, there is always a version tag in the main top level software entity:

software =
{
version = "0.1.0";

target-1 = {
images: (

What is the purpose of this tag? Does swupdate read it at all? Looking through the documentation, the only reference to *software* versions is where you can specify version numbers for specific images and ask swupdate to only update them if their version number is different than that found in /etc/sw-versions. But that doesn't seem to apply to this top level version tag.

[Stefano Babic]

Hi Amrbekhit,

The idea of the tag is to add a reference to a possible changes in
future schemas. This could be necessary if, for example, a future
SWUpdate will become incompatible with previous versions, and it is
required to identify the schema. All things that I would prefer to
avoid, frankly.

The tag is not currently used.

Best regards,
Stefano Babic

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[Jörg Krause]

Hi Stefano,

so the tag is related to the SWUpdate version. I have mistaken it for the firmware version to update to...

[Stefano Babic]

Hi Jörg,

On 05/08/2016 14:47, Jörg Krause wrote:
> Hi Stefano,
>
> so the tag is related to the SWUpdate version.

Yes, I have thought originally to introduce a mechanism to distinguish
between different schema.

> I have mistaken it for
> the firmware version to update to...

You have not mistaken because the tag is still unused :-)

Its meaning is becoming "reserved"...

I do not know if my original thoughts are still valid. In the
development, I have introduced more as one parser (at the beginning,
only libconfig was available), and having a versioning-schema makes less
sense. SWUpdate does not use this tag at all, we can still decide if we
have a use case for it (for example, as firmware version as you
thought), but we have at least to document it.

Best regards,
Stefano Babic

>
> On Thursday, August 4, 2016 at 11:54:00 AM UTC+2, Stefano Babic wrote:
>
> Hi Amrbekhit,
>

> sba...@denx.de <javascript:>
> =====================================================================