On Sat, Aug 21, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Joshua D. Drake <j...@commandprompt.com> wrote: > There was *NEVER* a Windows NT 4.0.x, there was Windows NT 4.0 SP2. >
I'm not sure what you're point is here. There was a NT 4.0 followed by SP1 through SP6. followed by NT 5.0, 5.1, 5.2, 6.0, 6.1, and 7.0. They also had brand names 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 7, etc -- is this model less confusing? The whole point here is that there is a pretty broad consensus across software projects that the first digit is for major releases that change the whole product character -- Linux 2.0, Samba 3.x, Libc 6, Even Windows 4 and Oracle 8. The second is for releases that add features, and the third digit is for minor releases. Our release numbering scheme is the same used by the vast majority of software packages. There are marketing pressures that cause version number inflation like Oracle 9i, 10g, 11g where regular releases are branded as huge improvements to warrant spending extra money on them. Sometimes the reverse happens and companies release regular releases and want to avoid bumping the number from a popular version. Things like Win 98 SP2 or Oracle 8i. But those are marketing pressures that large companies feel to deceive their users into misunderstanding what they're being sold. Open source projects have generally not felt pressures like that and have been able to just use regular version numbering schemes that users understand. Now we're getting the blowback from users confused by these marketing schemes who no longer understand how normal version number schemes work. There's no evidence that adopting marketing driven version numbering will confuse these people any less -- they're probably perpetually confused about software release engineerng -- and there's every reason to think that it would confuse the 99% of our users who are perfectly accustomed to software version numbering schemes much more to use an unusual scheme used only by a handful of other projects and (inconsistently) by big marketing departments. -- greg -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers