[asterisk-dev] ARI versioning in 13 and 14

[Mark Michelson]

Hi!

We were just about to start making the next round of release candidates 
for Asterisk. In doing so, we knew that we needed to bump the minor 
versions of AMI and ARI since new stuff had been added since the 
previous release. For AMI, this was fairly trivial. For ARI...well...

Currently, Asterisk 13 reports the ARI version as being 1.9.0. Asterisk 
14 reports the version as being 1.10.0. Asterisk 14 contains ARI 
commands not present in 13. If we bump the ARI version in 13, then it 
becomes 1.10.0. It therefore would have the same version as the initial 
release of 14, which leads to confusion. An ARI developer might think 
this means that Asterisk 13 has gained the new ARI commands introduced 
in Asterisk 14. But it hasn't.

What should we do here? We've currently thought of a few of ways of 
going with this:

1) Just bump the minor versions and document somewhere that the ARI 
version is "local" to a particular release of Asterisk. Therefore 
Asterisk 14's 1.10.0 is not the same as Asterisk 13's 1.10.0

2) Bump the major version of ARI for each major release of Asterisk. We 
won't retroactively apply this to the upgrade from Asterisk 12 to 
Asterisk 13. So Asterisk 13 will have ARI versions 1.X.Y, Asterisk 14 
will have ARI versions 2.X.Y, and Asterisk 15 will end up with Asterisk 
3.X.Y

3) Set the major version of ARI identical to the major version of 
Asterisk. Going forward, Asterisk 13 will have ARI versions 13.X.Y, 
Asterisk 14 will have ARI versions 14.X.Y, and Asterisk 15 will have ARI 
versions 15.X.Y

My personal choice would be to go with option 2. Option 1 is just 
generally confusing and makes keeping track of ARI versions difficult. 
Option 3 is tempting, but it could also cause confusion since the minor 
versions of Asterisk and ARI will be out of sync (e.g. a user might 
assume that Asterisk 14.3.0 would require ARI version 14.3.0, when 
that's not actually the case).

Feel free to voice your support for one of these options or to suggest 
something of your own.

Thanks,
Mark Michelson