From: <redacted>
Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2008 13:52:26 +0530

quoted

I'd suggest that the version number just be removed.  It becomes

meaningless (and often misleading) once a driver is in the mainline
kernel.  People will >update the driver without changing the version
number.  Code external to the driver but which affects it can change.

I totally disagree.  I find it very useful when I get a debugging
dump from the user and they have no idea where their kernel
came from nor can figure out how to determine the kernel version.

Sure it might sometimes not get updated for trivial patches that
bypass the maintainer, but the maintainer is always going to bump it
after non-trivial changes.