Why do we need a versioning policy?

Why? Because it's firmware and it's not tightly coupled to the driver.

The firmware will be used by various projects for NIC support. It's not just for ath9k_htc - hopefully OpenBSD will adopt it soon; FreeBSD/NetBSD will adopt it as soon as there's a driver available.

Since some downstream projects may wish to fork the github repository and do some of their own local development, each major and minor release will be a branch.

Ok, what's the policy?

The policy is thus:

1. No non-backwards compatible changes will occur on a major branch;
2. Minor version numbers may introduce new features but they must be optional and default to the previous firmware behaviour;
3. Major branch numbers may introduce non-backwards-compatible features.

So:

• Everything along the 1.x branch will be backwards compatible.
• There'll be a branch laid down for each minor revision released (eg 1.3, 1.4, 1.5).
• There'll be a tag laid down for each release along the minor revision (eg 1.3.1, 1.3.2, 1.3.3, etc.) which will match up with the binary firmware image that is released for public consumption.
• 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, etc can introduce new features, but they must be optional and default to the previous behaviour.

Hopefully what will be pushed into linux-firmware.git will be the latest of each major release version. Ie, there will only be one "current" firmware release in linux-firmware.git for 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, etc.