Re: New versioning scheme

On Thursday, May 12, 2016, Gavin Flower <GavinFlower(at)archidevsys(dot)co(dot)nz>
wrote:

> On 13/05/16 02:53, Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
>
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>>
>> Magnus Hagander reminded us:
>>
>> And we already have a version numbering scheme that confuses people :)
>>>
>> Exactly. I think it is time for us to realize that our beloved
>> "major.minor"
>> versioning is a failure, both at a marketing and a technical level. It's a
>> lofty idea, but causes way more harm than good in real life. People on
>> pgsql-hackers know that 9.1 and 9.5 are wildly different beasts. Clients?
>> They are running "Postgres 9". So I'm all in favor of doing away with
>> major and minor.
>>
>
> [...]
>
> Please don't go that way, the inflation of numbers like Firefox has, the
> numbers then have even less meaning.
>
> Stop dumbing things down!!! Help educate people, rather than become yet
> another Mushroom Farmer...
>
> Better would be a prominent notice of what the versioning scheme is all
> about, and link to http://semver.org.
>
>
>
Why the link? We don't do versioning in the way semver sets it up. We
don't operate in a way conducive to it either.

And if we stick to one release a year by the time we get in the 20 is won't
seem that unusual.

I personally see no reason to change, though whether being imprecise or
fundamentally uninformed the use of PostgreSQL 9 is in the wild and I
suspect often by serve providers for whom PostgreSQL is only one of their
responsibilities there because their client uses it.

I don't see the status quo changing. It's one of our percularities and
while a bit abnormal hasn't caused great harm to anyone. And forcing a
major version change every 5 years, while reasonable, is likewise generally
unjustified and would make on my part, be couple with additional work
around those versions which is unlikely to happen just because the
versioning policies changed.

David J.