Re: Newbie nonsense

[Todd Graham Lewis <tlewis mindspring net>]

On Sat, 2 Jan 1999 edgehp@together.net wrote:

> You folks have SERIOUS number problems!

I think that you just don't understand the numbering scheme.

> While gtk is good, the mess
> between gtk 1.0 and 1.1 is annoying. It looks to me as if 1.1 is so
> incompatible it should have been 2.0, instead.

No, 2.0 will have seriously improved functionality, not just incremental
improvements with different interfaces.  (RtL support, Unicode
support, theme-based widget rearrangement, these are the big ones
I've heard of which might be 2.0 fodder.)  Think "epoch.major.minor",
not "major.minor.noise".  For a similar example, take a look at the
differences between perl 5.004 and 5.005; we're not anywhere close to
that bad.

> It's also rather gutsy
> coming out with GNOME 0.99, straight from 0.3. It's good software, but
> the install is AWFULLY rocky, and you skipped 0.5, 0.7, and 0.9, more
> usual stopping places on the route to a BIG piece of software like this.

This isn't FreeBSD; the absence of 0.5 doesn't mean that we did not
get halfway.  If you like, think of 0.30 as 0.9 in FreeBSD-speak and
0.99 as the pre 1.0 bug fix release.  Just because you don't grok the
numbering scheme doesn't mean that things are broken -- numbering is
completely arbitrary, so one should gague progress by the actual code
and by what the developers say.

-- 
Todd Graham Lewis       tlewis@mindspring.net      (800) 719-4664, x2804

"It's still ludicrous that nobody's ever made a run at us by making UNIX
 a popular platform on PCs.  It's almost too late now."  -- Steve Balmer
"It is too late."   -- Bill Gates             _Newsweek_, 6/23/97, p. 82