Confusing build names.

[Michael Stone]

Aaron,

I apologize that I was unable to reply promptly to your second question.
Indeed, while builds are authoritatively named as I described in my
previous email, many people frequently leave off the stream name because
it can usually be inferred from contextual or circumstantial evidence.

As for the usage of "650", "653", "656", etc: certain builds have become
so well known (typically because they were made into stable releases)
that it became unimportant what stream contained them (especially after
further development of that stream has ceased). (Incidentally, these
builds are contained in the "official" branch as can be seen from the
URL structure at 

  http://download.laptop.org/xo-1/os/official/

Finally, two additional comments: builds are sometimes renamed between
branches, for example when ship.2-656 is christened official-656.
Second, the choice of numbers to attach to a build-branch is globally
arbitrary but locally ordered. From time to time, a set of build
branches will be "synced" which means that the next number to be built
with be the same in both branches; e.g. faster-1800 and joyride-1800.
Eventually, the branches may become "unsynced" (joyride and ship.2), and
joyride might suddently advance joyride-2500 to indicate a desire to
reuse the joyride name but to begin a new epoch of builds.

The fundamental sensation behind this choice of naming structure was our
expectation that many people (e.g. countries) would be making builds at
the same rough moment of time based on completely different (i.e.
incomparable) software bases but that small runs of builds within a
given branch probably would have usefully comparable metadata.

(Ultimately, we receive a build from an outside source, we usually
recursively diff it against a "similar" build that we understand in
order to see what's actually going on inside.)

Does this help alleviate your fully justified confusion?

Best,

Michael