On Sun, 13 Jan 2008 08:43:25 -0800, Michael G Schwern <schw...@pobox.com> wrote:
> Peter da Silva wrote: > > On 2008-01-13, at 00:22, Michael G Schwern wrote: > >> Lately I've been toying with ISO date integer versions, for that > >> "what, you're > >> using the 2005 version?! Your shit is OLD! UPGRADE NOW!" effect. > >> http://use.perl.org/~schwern/journal/35127 > > > > I tried that for a while, but even *I* couldn't keep track of what > > version numbers meant, and it was my own project. > > > > If the current version is 1.5.4 and the guy's running 1.5.2 that tells > > me more than if the current version's 20070620 and the guy's running > > 19990114. > > It tells you that it's eight years old, and that's concrete information. You Only time-wise. It gives me zitch information on wheather it's worthwhile to install this `upgrade'. It could as well be a deserted project that someone took over to make it compile/build again on his OS-XYZZY-revB and *nothing* changed at all. > know that eight years is a damn long time in software years and it's a flag > that you should probably look into it. It's not much, but it's something. > > What does 1.5.4 vs 1.5.2 really tell you? There's all sorts of things you That this is a minor upgrade, probably fix a few outstanding bugs, not too many new features. I will be able to read in the NEWS/README/ChangLog/Changes if I want this upgrade > THINK it tells you, but all it really says is there was at least one revision > between them and 1.5.4 is the newer one. Maybe there was two revisions, but > maybe they skipped odd revisions (I sometimes do). And what does 1.5 mean? > Is it following the "odd == alpha" convention? WHO KNOWS?! How much changed? > Well, it's just one revision so it couldn't possibly be much, but that's just > guessing. It could be that very same eight years difference but you don't > even have that to go on. And what does it give you more/less than a dated versioning system? NOTHING > Oooh, and then there's the odd/even alpha/release fun. Now is 1.4.6 newer > than 1.5.1? Could be! Can you safely use 1.5.1? Who knows? Haha, have fun > figuring it out, sucker! Must agree on that. > X.Y.Z gives off all sorts of false readings, and every extra .N that gets > tacked on just scrambles it further. The reality is in the mind of the person > who did the release. Even if they do document it, you've got to dig in and > figure out what each individual project means. > > Look at how much we try to ram into the version number. Maturity (0.x vs > 1.x), dev vs stable (X.odd vs X.even), progression (X.Y -> X.Y+1), > compatibility (will X+1 be compatible with X?), amount of change (X+5 must be > really different from X and X+1 not much difference)... and it's all just > guesswork. I've I'm going to put all that information into a release I'm > going to do it in some concrete form. > > I once got a complaint because the changes in my 2.0 release weren't > significant enough to warrant "2.0". 1.0 -> 2.0 was a complete internals > rewrite, major to me. They just saw that it was nothing but bug fixes. You > can't resolve that difference of visibility and expectations between author > and user, so I'm leaving the game. -- H.Merijn Brand Amsterdam Perl Mongers (http://amsterdam.pm.org/) using & porting perl 5.6.2, 5.8.x, 5.10.x on HP-UX 10.20, 11.00, 11.11, & 11.23, SuSE 10.1 & 10.2, AIX 5.2, and Cygwin. http://qa.perl.org http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/ http://www.test-smoke.org http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/
