Version number format in the first line of the output?

[tueda]

As the release of version 5.0.0 is a major release that allows breaking changes, it is worth revisiting an old question. See also #213, #263.

The current version number format in the output is (assuming a normal build):

FORM 5.0.0-beta.1 (Jan 23 2026, v5.0.0-beta.1-318-gb18dc53)

For version 5.0.0, it will be:

FORM 5.0.0 (Jan XX 2026, v5.0.0)

Including both 5.0.0 and v5.0.0 may seem redundant.

For example, could this be simplified to the following?

FORM v5.0.0-beta.1-318-gb18dc53 (Jan 23 2026)

FORM v5.0.0 (Jan XX 2026)

The prefix v may also be removed.

Or could such changes potentially break scripts used by some users?

By the way, a non-standard build (without Git repository), as seen in Ubuntu 25.04/25.10, leads to:

FORM 5.0 (Jan 24 2026)

The seemingly redundant current format can help distinguish these builds.

Another thing is: do we still avoid introducing a patch-level SUBSUBVERSION_ preprocessor variable?

Having said that, we can simply release it as it is.

[tueda]

By the way, form -v also prints the timing:

FORM 5.0.0-beta.1 (Jan 23 2026, v5.0.0-beta.1-319-gd776835)
  0.00 sec out of 0.00 sec

while tform -v doesn't:

TFORM 5.0.0-beta.1 (Jan 23 2026, v5.0.0-beta.1-319-gd776835)

For consistency, it would be better to unify this behaviour, but I’m not sure which one is better.

[jodavies]

I think -v doesn't need to print the time, it is only for fetching version information and we don't care that it takes 0.00 seconds.

For the version information, I think it is OK as it is. The first part TFORM 5.0.0-beta.1 depends on the latest tag, and everything in the brackets is more detailed information that depends on exactly which commit and which date the user compiled the binary.

We could indeed add SUBSUBVERSION_, since we do tag releases with a sub-sub version and have done for some years.