Description Christian K. 2011-11-16 09:53:14 EST

Currently the meta model descriptor and version data classes in Sphinx support the concept of an ordinal. The ordinal is a primitive int which has been introduced with the intention to provide version related ordering for different meta model versions.
Ordinals will be deprecated and removed in future Sphinx versions out of the following reasons:
- an ordinal has weak semantics and often it is overly complicated to map this to real world versioning schemes, e.g. a scheme which is divided into major/minor or major/minor/patch.
- ordinals are not used frequently or at all
- replacing ordinals with a more generic approach potentially based on an int[] array would be complex but still it is doubtful if all requirementes can be met by specific meta model families

Instead a subclass of MetaModelVersionData should be created which implements the version semantics of a specific meta model family.