i certainly hope none of the advocates for codenames take my proposal or my vigorous defense of it personally. i respect everyone here, and am arguing as strongly as i can for what i now believe is the best solution to a real problem. if someone has even better arguments for codenames (or yet another solution), i'll gladly switch my position again (as i've already done 3 times in this thread -- though i honestly don't see that happening). nothing personal, and no offense intended to anyone... On Sep 21, 2006, at 1:01 AM, Khalid B wrote:
We currently lack a fixed name for each release cycle, and a codename is one way of doing this rather than cvs and HEAD and other moving targets.
my proposal addresses this. we'd have fixed names for *everything*. long before this thread (and at least twice already in this thread) i've explained my violent opposition to the status quo of "CVS" or "HEAD". please argue against what i'm actually proposing.
Please note that this was true in the past for Linux. However, as of 2.6, the Linux kernel has abandoned this.
fools. ;) just because they ditched a totally working system isn't a reason not to use it ourselves. we use the same version numbering scheme for the code we write at my day job, have never had to consider using code names for anything, never have any of the ambiguity problems that currently plague drupal, and constantly miss release targets/dates and have to change our plans regularly... ;) it's worked great for literally 12 years.
Drawbacks:
- This scheme introduces yet another convention/numbering scheme. - Codenames avoids that.
this is a non-argument: codenames introduce yet another convention/ scheme, too. point is: we *NEED* a new convention/scheme, since what we have now is so broken. the question is what should that new convention be, not if we need one.
we can make the DRUPAL-5-2 branch, we change the version string from 5.1.7-dev (which we never released) to 5.2.0-beta-1. the TRUNK immediately becomes 5.3.0-dev.
This does not solve the problem of a documentation page referring to 5.1.7-dev.
i refer you to steven peck's previous comments about the imaginary documentation team writing imaginary documents. no one's going to write extensive documentation about a development release that was never officially released. this is another non-argument, and in the exceedingly rare event that it actually happened, the solution is simple: the edit tab. besides, 5.1.7-dev *was* released as the nightly tarball snapshot for some period of time, and if someone wants to file a bug against that or refer to it in a forum post, it's still a totally valid version string to identify the post with. the only reason i brought it up is to point out that it's ok if we switch from "5.1.7-dev" to "5.2.0-beta-1" without ever really releasing "5.1.7". "dev" always means "the development snapshot from the end of this branch". in fact, this *would* be an appropriate place to use "HEAD", but that's already ingrained in drupal's terminology with the wrong meaning, which is why i'd never advocate using it for this. thanks, -derek