Activity versioning schema

[Eben Eliason]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 6:18 PM, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at laptop.org> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 6:07 PM, Eben Eliason <eben.eliason at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 5:55 PM, Jameson Chema Quinn <
> jquinn at cs.oberlin.edu>
>
> I agree with almost everything jquinn said, except for the use of ':'
> to delimit version numbers.  Like it or not, the rest of the software
> world uses '.'.  If we're going to a 'dotted decimal' scheme, we
> should use '.'.  The cost of doing things "our own way" is just too
> high otherwise.
>
> > I don't expect to have any encoded info which makes this decidedly easy.
>  I
> > just want a simple way to say that versions 3.x - 5.x work on  OS release
> > 8.2.  Nothing in the bundle needs to indicate that specifically, but at
> > least we'd have a way to easily document compatibilities. I understand
> what
>
> No, you've missed my point: it is *not possible* to put this
> information in the bundle, because we don't *know* that version 8 is
> incompatible with release 9.1 *until after 9.1 is released*.  So the
> compatibility information has to be maintained externally.
>

On the contrary, you are missing mine.  I don't *want* this in the bundle.
 I want this to be a sentence that can be stated, at some point following
the release of 9.1, by a wiki page, the release notes, a tech support
person, a friend, or the developer herself.  Nothing more.  No technical
magic here.  The technical changes suggested (dotted decimal versioning
scheme) are simply a nicety to make uttering this sentence more natural.


> So, that separates our concerns into two independent problems:
>  a) is it worthwhile to add dotted decimal version numbers?  (I remain
> unconvinced that this solves any problems, and introduces ambiguities
> of comparison:  Is 1.1 "newer" or "older" than 1.11?)


I think this is still a whole bunch clearer than trying to convince someone
that version 5 is newer than version 10! (where 10 is a "bugfix" release to
what used to be version 4.)

- Eben
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