On Sat, 15 Mar 2003, Audioslave - 7M3 - Live wrote: >>>I knew that the 2.5 kernel was a development kernel. I did not realize that Redhat >>>release numbering did not follow that convention. >> >> >> Knowing is half the battle (or something like that). > >I got the concept that Red Hat followed the odd/even scheme from some >comments that others made awhile back. The article that I was reading, >in the timeframe for the 6.x releases that someone referenced. Since >that time, I thought that the odd numbers were less stable than the even >ordered releases. But in practice, I always tried to run the latest >releases and paid little attention to the actual versioning number. > >I suppose that expalins why the reviewer was finding that 6.1 worked >better than either 6.0 or 6.2.
Every Red Hat Linux release is a "stable" OS release. That meanss every x.0, x.1, x.2, x.3, etc. Different people will have wildly differing opinions on just how "stable" each of those releases are, and those opinions will be affected also by how well a new OS release works with their particular hardware, and the particular software they use. Opinions are also subject greatly to the psychological placebo effect which I refer to as "the dot zero effect". This effect is a psychological phenomenon whereby the mere existance of ".0" in the version number of anything automatically triggers a defense mechanism in a person to assume that the given "dot zero" software is buggy beforehand without actually using it. This sets up a pre-basis bias against the software, and any big or small flaw found in the software after attempting to use it will be over-magnified by "the dot zero effect" and blown out of proportion due to the pre-bias. This condition is a natural placebo-ish effect that a large number of people suffer from. Unfortunately, this condition also has a living-in-denial aspect to it, which renders the afflicted persons uncapable of true rational and unbiased thought concerning the problems experienced. In other words, it is generally not possible to disable the "dot zero effect" in the minds of the afflicted persons. The only way to avoid the dot zero effect in any software, is to completely avoid ever releasing any software as a dot zero piece of software. In other words, you don't actually change the software at all, you just don't "stamp" it as x.0. This phenomenon is widely seen in both open source software as well as commercial software. Many commercial software companies have steered away from the dot zero phenomenon completely by avoiding labeling their software with version numbers. Microsoft is one prime example. Microsoft stopped version numbering most of their software back in 1995, when they released "Windows 95". Under the hood, it was "Windows 4.0", but that technical detail is only known by the few tech-heads that cared enough to know. The masses of consumers just did not see the "dot zero" anymore. The year-versioning of software caught on by many different companies since then, and also with some open source projects too, such as UW imap-2002 et al. For whatever reasons Microsoft has since moved away from year versioning also to more arbitrary versioning of products such as "Windows ME" and "Windows XP". Under the wraps, in traditional terms, these pieces of software are "dot zero" software, however they're not marketed as such, and so the psychological bad juju of the "dot zero" phenomenon generally does not occur. Of course, this is merely my own personal opinion. Those whom are afflicted by "the dot zero" phenomenon, and in particular those in the deep denial phase of this illness, may disagree abhorently. They're of course free to do so, and we hope they get well soon. Take care, TTYL -- Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat -- Phoebe-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/phoebe-list
