Re: Version Numbering

On Sat, 2010-08-21 at 18:24 +0100, Greg Stark wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)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?

Yeah sorry. I kind of went down a path without completing the thought
process.

There was no NT 5.0, 5.1 etc... There may have been an internal name, an
engineers name, or heck possibly even if you did "help about" it would
mention 5.0 (I don't actually know). However, the users never new them
as those. Period. Which is what I am getting at.

Our new and less technical users are confused about whether 8.1 and 8.2
are 8.0 SP1 and 8.0 SP2. Which they clearly aren't.

>
> 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,

All three of those are irrelevant to this conversation. Users don't run
Linux 2.0. They run Ubuntu, Fedora or SUSE.

I can easily on a weekly basis run into a customer, or external
community user that says, "I am running PostgreSQL 8". They will
actually be running, "8.0, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3 or 8.4". Yes, a good number of
more technical, or those who have been in the community longer have
figured it out

Let's make this simple:

Q. Do we have a problem?
A. Some of our contributors, even some very experienced contributors
feel we do.

Q. What is the problem we are trying to solve?
A. That users, especially those that are less technical are confused by
our versioning system.

Q. How do we solve that problem?
A. ...

Q. Does the presented solution create a new problem that must be solved?
A. ...

It would be great everyone would stop arguing semantics (myself
included) and just attempt to solve the problem.

Education isn't going to cut it, we have been educating for almost 15
years.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

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