From: Christian H. <ch...@gn...> - 2004-08-31 16:02:44
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On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 08:23:31AM -0500, Ethan Blanton wrote: > Tim Ringenbach spake unto us the following wisdom: > > The only thing I saw against v83 was it's a big number, and we can neve= r=20 > > change our mind and decide we want to use a little major number again,= =20 > > without breaking package managers and the like. >=20 > So ... while I would be opposed to a versioning scheme which required > manual intervention at all times, this particular problem is solvable. > For RPM, for example, we would simply change the epoch in the specfile > from 1 to 2, and this problem would magically go away. That's not to > say that shrinking version numbers don't have other eccentricities, but > this particular problem shouldn't be a showstopper. :-) That's RPM. RPM isn't the only packaging system out there, as you know. It will break stuff, and it will confuse people if we ever decide to switch back. Forcing us to use just major numbers from now on prevents us from ever deciding to change things in a clean way in gaim again. None of us may even be on the project a few years from now. We just don't know yet. I wouldn't want to make this decision for our future selves or anybody else who is in charge at some point in the future. Now, why is it that we haven't adopted a major.minor.micro scheme? I know there's the whole argument that people then expect major numbers to equal how good the release is, and all that. Yeah, it's stupid, but this vXX thing may cause even more confusion, and likely we'll get comments about how we're doing it so we seem newer than other clients. Which is stupid, but I guarantee it. (Man, this is a flashback to another project. History repeats itself.) When we have libgaim, we may very well want major.minor.micro. Sure, the gaim binary can be vXX, or v0.XX, or v12.34.67.XX, or whatever, but libgaim should probably fall back on a major.minor.micro, and we should be more careful about what we do with it. Fortunately, whatever change we make for gaim doesn't really have to affect libgaim, but I'm just throwing that out there. Anyhow, I'm still pretty strongly against it, and before just going and making some decision, we really should reach a consensus, as best as we can. Sean states in his e-mail that "most people acknowledge that there is no real difference between 0.84 and 84, and most people agree that given our current style of development, 84 seems more appropriate." I've been seeing more people disagree with the vXX scheme than agree with it, so I'm not sure where that comes from, but let's not make a decision right away. Nobody says we have to make this change now. Oh, and as I said before, v0.83 wasn't the 83rd release. Remember the entire 0.59.x series. We blew this a long time ago, guys. People don't care what release number we are. If we want that information, let's store it in some other string in the about dialog. Users just want to know it's a release that's going to work for them, as do I. Christian --=20 Christian Hammond <> The Galago Project ch...@gn... <> http://galago.sourceforge.net/ BUFFERS=3D20 FILES=3D15 2nd down, 4th quarter, 5 yards to go! |