<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 6:18 PM, C. Scott Ananian <<a href="mailto:cscott@laptop.org">cscott@laptop.org</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div class="Ih2E3d">On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 6:07 PM, Eben Eliason <<a href="mailto:eben.eliason@gmail.com">eben.eliason@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 5:55 PM, Jameson Chema Quinn <<a href="mailto:jquinn@cs.oberlin.edu">jquinn@cs.oberlin.edu</a>><br>
<br>
</div>I agree with almost everything jquinn said, except for the use of ':'<br>
to delimit version numbers. Like it or not, the rest of the software<br>
world uses '.'. If we're going to a 'dotted decimal' scheme, we<br>
should use '.'. The cost of doing things "our own way" is just too<br>
high otherwise.<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
> I don't expect to have any encoded info which makes this decidedly easy. I<br>
> just want a simple way to say that versions 3.x - 5.x work on OS release<br>
> 8.2. Nothing in the bundle needs to indicate that specifically, but at<br>
> least we'd have a way to easily document compatibilities. I understand what<br>
<br>
</div>No, you've missed my point: it is *not possible* to put this<br>
information in the bundle, because we don't *know* that version 8 is<br>
incompatible with release 9.1 *until after 9.1 is released*. So the<br>
compatibility information has to be maintained externally.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
So, that separates our concerns into two independent problems:<br>
a) is it worthwhile to add dotted decimal version numbers? (I remain<br>
unconvinced that this solves any problems, and introduces ambiguities<br>
of comparison: Is 1.1 "newer" or "older" than 1.11?)</blockquote><div><br></div><div>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.)</div>
<div><br></div><div>- Eben</div></div>