Re: Version Numbering

On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 6:37 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
> 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. ...

Sorry, but this is all a logical fallacy. There will always be a
percentage of people who are confused. The question is which scheme
results in the least confusion and communicates the most information.

Following industry standard practice is the best way to minimize that
confusion. If we adopt a different scheme then it might be clearer to
beginners but be confusing and unhelpful to everyone else. It'll look
like we're doing a major rewrite every year and there's no way to tell
which releases are major changes and which are just annual releases.

Frankly I think we've been bumping version numbers too often. It's a
consequence of the insane pace of development we've had. Adding PITR
in 8.0 was a pretty major step and hot standby in 9.0 will be big too.
But we should be limiting the first digit for Perl 6 scale changes,
not just features that are really really cool.

--
greg