Subject: Re: Topic: Versioning scheme and 1.0
rms@greymalkin.yi.org
Date: Thu May 03 2001 - 07:23:01 CDT
On Thu, May 03, 2001 at 09:06:05AM +0200, Jesper Skov wrote:
> It's different in that no-one gets itchy about a new major release
> when the revision counters get to be 2-digit.
Someone is bound to get itchy by release 50 issues, or release 100 issues :) Just check out the fanfare comic books make on those issues! :)
> I'm not sure about this, but I think 0.7.15 suggests to many people
> that we'd be going for 0.8 soonish - because we've ben with 0.7 for so
> long, and so much has happened. This is not the Linux kernel with
> bi-weekly releases, so we'll never get to 0.x.>20 in less than a year.
I think AbiWord deserves a public 0.8 beta fairly stable with our current feature set somewhat polished, and leave that trunk in the attic only updating it for real bug fixes.
> Anyway, my point is that the integer release number is open ended -
> there's no implicit information in the version number about how long
> we've been at any given step in AbiWord's evolution. It becomes a
> sequence of interesting releases instead (other projects use +0.0.1
> for mostly bugfixes IMO - we're rather different in that regard in
> AbiWord).
Yes, but then, we are like in a devel series (odd number), and the minor there only publishes not bug fixes but new releases of the development releases, however stable they are! :)
I believe we are very much in accord to the way of thinking.
> I'm only interested in progressive development. That's _all_ I want
> to show from bumping the release number. The status is
> _AbiWord_ - I've always thought it was braindead that users had to
> judge application improvement from a version number. Makes sense in
It's braindead but it happens, and we have to live with it. Since we're in beta stages, calling a version 1.0 will give end users the idea that that's how we envision abiword to be, and not how powerfull we aim to be. And since they'll miss important features for common word processing (simple tables, footnotes, et all) they'll think it's a pretty well done toy. Users are not geeks, they will not rush and help our development. They will complain and complain about the lack of PICK YOUR FAVORITE FEATURE that they expect to find in a Word Processor, many of them fairly reasonable.
> the commercial world; if the cashflow is low, make a major version
> bump and cash in as the users stampede. But we're not driven by
> cool cash, so we can easily afford to be user friendly - by moving the
> state from the version string (which everyone interprets differently
> anyway) to the application.
The major.minor.rev versions, in the opensource world, are mostly representative of what the developers think of the product.
The common ground of this thread seems to be that it's early to call it a final product. (not final as in the last but as in ready)
> In other words, your perception of what needs to be added to AbiWord
> to make a major revision bump differs from mine, which differs from
> Dom's, which differs from... You get it...
I propose to mantain the major.minor.rev for public releases, and the $release++ for development purposes, what do you think?
Hugs, rms
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