Re: Three Point Zero - Idea Mockups

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Wed, 25 May 2005 21:47:41 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Maybe our version scheme should be 3.0, 3.2, 3.4; 4.0, 4.2, 4.4;
> etc. or maybe just 3, 4, 5, 6
> 
> It feels like there's pressure to break ABI just so we can bump the
> version number! If we want to bump the version number let's just do it.

The 2.x scheme is nice from a platform perspective because the
idiom is X.Y where Y+N releases are backwards compatible with Y as long as
X remains the same. So it's nice for developers.

But this is a crappy version scheme for users (who probably won't even see
it anyway). And it leads to dumb pressure because people assume that X+1
necessarily means something Extra Cool.

Apple and Ubuntu both give their releases codenames that somehow stick.
Nobody says "I'm using Ubuntu 5.whatever", they call them by the silly yet
catchy names they're given during development. And Mac users often call
the releases Tiger or Panther (oh how painfully cool).

So maybe GNOME should switch to a purely name based versioning scheme.
Drop the 2 prefix, it just becomes GNOME not GNOME 2 and give each release
a new name (avoid animals, it's been done ;). That would also focus
peoples minds back on iterative improvements instead of breaking backwards
compatibility or top-down rethinks. Instead of "GNOME 2.12" it could be
called, oh, I don't know, the GNOME Topaz release.

thanks -mike

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