Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2021 20:29:43 -0600 (MDT)
From: Ariadne Conill <ariadne@dereferenced.org>
To: ~alpine/devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: [3.15] System change proposal: rename the Alpine 3.15 release to
 Alpine 15
Message-ID: <3824aef2-8af2-d33a-47e3-c7c66bd6615e@dereferenced.org>
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Hello,

Alpine has traditionally used the major version to represent the current 
ABI version the system uses.  For example, Alpine 1.x was uClibc without 
NPTL, Alpine 2.x was uClibc with NPTL and Alpine 3.x is based on musl.

With the current ABI being evergreen, and our having moved past the 3.14 
release, it no longer makes sense to keep the 3.x designation.  When this 
was previously proposed, the primary request was to postpone this 
discussion until after Alpine 3.14 release.  With the Alpine 3.14 release 
imminent, I believe now is a time to bring this up again.

An argument could have been made to jump to Alpine 4.x with apk-tools 3, 
but we have decided to implement apk-tools 3 out in a way that is 
non-disruptive.  So that argument is now moot, as well.

## Benefits to Alpine

As the `3.` part of the version is now effectively meaningless, it is 
helpful to downstream consumers of Alpine to have a simplified versioning 
scheme.  For example, postmarketOS can say "based on Alpine 15" instead of 
"Alpine 3.15" which sounds better.

Yes, to be brutally honest, this is an entirely marketing-related thing, 
and there is no technical benefit either way.  However, this versioning 
scheme is more aligned with other Linux distributions.

## Implementation Plan

Set the version of `alpine-base` to `15_alphaXXXXXXXX` instead of 
`3.15_alphaXXXXXXXX`.

## Contingency Plan

If we decide we don't want to do this, we just downgrade `alpine-base` 
back to `3.15_alphaXXXXXXXX`.

Ariadne