Re: Version Numbering

On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd@commandprompt.com> wrote:
> There was *NEVER* a Windows NT 4.0.x, there was Windows NT 4.0 SP2.
>

I'm not sure what you're point is here. There was a NT 4.0 followed by
SP1 through SP6. followed by NT 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 6.0, 6.1, and 7.0. They
also had brand names 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 7, etc -- is this model
less confusing?

The whole point here is that there is a pretty broad consensus across
software projects that the first digit is for major releases that
change the whole product character -- Linux 2.0, Samba 3.x, Libc 6,
Even Windows 4 and Oracle 8.  The second is for releases that add
features, and the third digit is for minor releases. Our release
numbering scheme is the same used by the vast majority of software
packages.

There are marketing pressures that cause version number inflation like
Oracle 9i, 10g, 11g where regular releases are branded as huge
improvements to warrant spending extra money on them.

Sometimes the reverse happens and companies release regular releases
and want to avoid bumping the number from a popular version. Things
like Win 98 SP2 or Oracle 8i.

But those are marketing pressures that large companies feel to deceive
their users into misunderstanding what they're being sold. Open source
projects have generally not felt pressures like that and have been
able to just use regular version numbering schemes that users
understand.

Now we're getting the blowback from users confused by these marketing
schemes who no longer understand how normal version number schemes
work. There's no evidence that adopting marketing driven version
numbering will confuse these people any less -- they're probably
perpetually confused about software release engineerng -- and there's
every reason to think that it would confuse the 99% of our users who
are perfectly accustomed to software version numbering schemes much
more to use an unusual scheme used only by a handful of other projects
and (inconsistently) by big marketing departments.

-- 
greg