On Friday, 3 February 2023 09:29:50 CET Jiri Pirko wrote:
[...]

Why kernel version is not enough for you? My point is, why to maintain
internal driver version alongside with the kernel version?

[...]

quoted

Also note that we can't do a simple kernel version to year
notation mapping in userspace in batctl. OpenWrt uses the most
recent Linux LTS release. But might feature a backport of a more
recent batman-adv which is newer than the one this stable kernel
would provide. Or people also often use Debian stable but compile
and use the latest batman-adv version with it.

Yeah, for out of tree driver, have whatever.

A while back, my personal opinion changed after there were various Linux 
developers/maintainers were trying to either remove it or wondering about this 
bump. The idea which I've proposed was to:

* still ship the "backports" like out-of-tree tarball with a module version - 
  but directly in its "compat" code
* continue to use in projects (which for whatever reason cannot use the in-
  kernel implementation) a version which represents their upstream backports 
  tarball + their (patch) revision: Something like "2022.0-openwrt-7"
* for the in-kernel module, just return either 

  - remove the version information completely from the kernel module 
    MODULE_VERSION + drop BATADV_ATTR_VERSION + modifying batctl to fetch that 
    from uname(). But of course, that would break old batctl versions [1]
  - or by setting BATADV_SOURCE_VERSION to UTS_RELEASE (+suffix?) or 
    UTS_VERSION


But this wasn't well received when mentioning it to Simon+Linus (but I could 
misremember the persons involved here).

Kind regards,
	Sven

[1] https://lore.kernel.org/r/20201205085604.1e3fcaee@kicinski-fedora-pc1c0hjn.DHCP.thefacebook.com (local)