Issue #21770 has been updated by Eregon (Benoit Daloze). :+1: I don't think it has any usefulness anymore. I do know of one usage of `RUBY_PATCHLEVEL`, for detecting if on a dev build or release version via `is_release = RUBY_PATCHLEVEL >= 0`. Notably used in https://github.com/grpc/grpc/blob/46b1795eacc99065c46e3fb60fad808c19f71a87/s... So probably best to keep the constant, but only give it values 0 for releases (and on release branch) or -1 for dev builds (from master). ---------------------------------------- Misc #21770: Stop bumping RUBY_PATCHLEVEL in release versions https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/21770#change-115559 * Author: k0kubun (Takashi Kokubun) * Status: Open ---------------------------------------- ## Proposal * Stop bumping `RUBY_PATCHLEVEL` from `0` in Ruby 4.0.0+ ## Motivation * As a stable branch maintainer, I find it frustrating that reverting a commit made by `tool/merger.rb` often causes a conflict on `#define RUBY_PATCHLEVEL`. ## Background * From Ruby 2.1.0, we stopped doing multiple patch-level releases for a single version, e.g. [2.0.0-p647](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2015/08/18/ruby-2-0-0-p647-released/) and [2.0.0-p648](https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2015/12/16/ruby-2-0-0-p648-released/) for Ruby 2.0.0. * From Ruby 3.2.0, we stopped showing patch levels on `RUBY_DESCRIPTION` [Feature #18513]. We thought "patch levels no longer serves us very well". * Today, we also backport patches using pull requests on GitHub. We often don't bump `RUBY_PATCHLEVEL` there because it's easier to use `git cherry-pick` instead of `tool/merger.rb`. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/