On Wednesday, 12 December 2012 at 18:33:17 UTC, Jesse Phillips
wrote:
On Wednesday, 12 December 2012 at 10:22:32 UTC, foobar wrote:
To summarize:
2. The version scheme is meaningless. Please check out
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/#firefox as an
example. It's perfectly clear, you can choose what Mozilla
calls a channel - i.e "release" or "beta".
This is a poor example as it doesn't show how the development
team develops these versions.
If we are going to have a branch supported separate from the
beta/dev builds then we need a way to say that this stable
version is newer but is not as new as the beta/dev.
If we release 2.61 as a stable, we would then develop new
features in which version? 2.62 beta 1? If so, when we release
2.61 with a bug fix which version do we release? 2.62? 2.61
stable 2?
You are right that version numbers have absolutely no meaning,
I don't remember if it was you, but they are also not as
important as the process improvements. However if we assign
meaning to numbers there can be benefit. Mozilla basically just
did away with the Major version. (I say we do a Linux and leave
the 2 then realize it has no meaning and up it to 3 when we
reach the age of the 2.0 kernel)
We should combine your beta with an added version number.
2.61.0 => bugfixes => 2.61.1
2.61.0 => newfeatures => 2.62.0 beta 1
2.62 => preparing for stabilizing => 2.62 rc1
just some thoughts.
Per my answer to Rob:
D2 *is* the major version.
releases should be minor versions and largely backwards
compatible - some evolution is allowed given some reasonable
restrictions like a proper migration path over several releases.
Critical bug-fixes can go directly on stable releases but nothing
else.
Other enhancements, new features, etc, go first on monthly beta
versions and need to pass acceptance tests & community approval
before graduating to stable. So a big feature such as "User
defined attributes" can spend several cycles of beta testing and
can go redesigns until everyone agrees that the final design is
worthy of inclusion in the next stable release.
