On Tuesday 19 September 2006 14:16, Derek Wright wrote:
On Sep 19, 2006, at 11:03 PM, Khalid B wrote:
Case in point using Trae's Ubuntu example: they have a six month release cycle, and their numbers are YY.MM (Year and Month). 5.10 (October 2005) should have been followed by 6.04 (April), but because it was late by two months, it came out as 6.06 (June).
in that case, ubuntu just has a stupid convention for version numbers. if they're going to go that far (numbers based on year, which is sort of cool, and supports my partially-joking proposal for "major.patch" version numbers), they just screwed up what the 2nd part should be. it shouldn't be the month (since you don't know that in advance). it should be the # of releases they did that year. so, the first release in a year is always "YY.1", and the 2nd release should be "YY.2". problem solved. no "catchy" [sic] code names required.
This is how Perforce numbers their releases. I've always thought it was a good idea, although I've never worked on projects numbered this way. I see how it might make sense to add the month number as well (even if its just the month of the freeze, and not the actual release). IMHO, 4.7 should have been called 5.0. Having a numbering scheme like Perforce's would do away with that sort of confusion (and debate). It also makes it easy to figure out how old your software is. So +1 from me. -Dave