On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 4:27 AM, Segher Boessenkool <seg...@kernel.crashing.org> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 08:44:41AM +0100, Richard Sandiford wrote: >> So why >> not just stick to the current scheme and have 5.0.0, 5.0.1, 5.0.2 etc.? > > Yes, why would we use a different numbering scheme now? There is no change > in development / release planning, unless I missed something. Is this just > to have bigger number than the "competition"? Or is it change for change's > sake? Are there no more important things to be done?
It's to avoid the need to decide whether to bump the major version. For example for the next release I don't see a particularly good reason to bump from 4.9 to 5.0 - not a reason that wasn't present when going from 4.8 to 4.9. And going from 4.9 to 5.0 suggests that 5.0 is not as stable as 4.9 while in reality our "major" version doesn't carry any useful information. Thus, as 4.10.0 is as bad for existing scripts as 5.0.0 take the opportunity to get rid of that no-information-carrying "major" number (by making the patchlevel version unused). And yes, it also looks nicer marketing-wise - but that's not the reason to change it. Richard. > > Segher
