On Sat, Apr 07, 2001 at 08:27:33PM -0400, Tavin Cole wrote: > On Sat, Apr 07, 2001 at 04:38:36PM -0400, Michael Carmack wrote:
> "We expect Freenet to become usable around Fred 6 or 7" I thought about the same thing. But I wonder if this just sounds strange because we've been conditioned to associate the first number in a version string with how advanced a product is. Amongst ourselves we laugh at how silly it is for companies to play "version-war", and we deny that arbitrary commercial versioning has any effect on our perceptions. But the fact that developers often decide against logical versioning in favor of psychological versioning suggests otherwise. Our thoughts may not be as much our own as we would like to think. OTOH, it's not commonly considered good practice to race through major numbers in the first place. Developers should make a strong effort to provide backwards compatibility for as long as is reasonably possible. Otherwise it makes it very difficult for others to build tools around the technology. It's easy to upgrade when you're only getting additional features; it's much harder when features that you came to rely on are taken away. Perhaps in the early alpha stages of development where progress would be significantly hindered if too much effort is given to backwards compatibility, the Freenet project could adopt alpha major numbering. This would give releases with version numbers like C.8.1, C.8.2, etc., and would preserve all the benefits of major/minor/subminor versioning while still reserving "1.0.0" for the first release that was intended for the general consumption. It's not a perfect solution but it's a bit more logical and robust than what is currently being used. m. _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl at freenetproject.org http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devl >From devl-admin at freenetproject.org Sat Apr 7 21:45:50 2001 Return-Path: <devl-admin at freenetproject.org> Received: from hawk.freenetproject.org (postfix@[4.18.42.11]) by funky.danky.com (8.9.3/8.8.7) with ESMTP id VAA07462 for <danello at danky.com>; Sat, 7 Apr 2001 21:45:49 -0400 Received: from hawk.freenetproject.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by hawk.freenetproject.org (Postfix) with ESMTP
