[GRASS5] Roadmap: Numbering

[Buchan Milne]

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Markus Neteler wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 04:20:30PM +0200, Buchan Milne wrote:
>
>>Markus Neteler wrote:
>>
>>>On Tue, Aug 12, 2003 at 07:28:43PM +0100, Paul Kelly wrote:
>>
>>>According to this suggestion I have updated the roadmap:
>>>http://grass.itc.it/roadmap.html
>>
>>As a mostly-user of grass, I get confused by this. Where was 5.2? Why no
>>5.1 if there is a 5.3? What about 5.7 if there is a 5.8?
>>
>>The other software I am familiar with that has a similar problem with
>>versioning is samba. They had a stable release branch, 2.0.x, and were
>>doing heavy development in HEAD, which was supposed to be 2.1. Then,
>>they realised they would need a new stable branch with selected features
>>from HEAD (win2k support when a domain controller). So, they renumbered
>>HEAD to 3.0, but the new stable release branch became 2.2.x.
>>
>>Grass is in a similar position. I would suggest, to keep people from
>>wondering about seemingly random version numbers, to:
>>
>>- -keep 5.0.x branch in bugfix mode
>>- -development of current grass50 cvs becomes 5.1, if pre-release
>>snapshots are to be made, eventually becoming 5.2.x
>
> To me this looks more confusing:

To whom? Grass developers? How many grass users have seen 5.1 who would
be confused by this?

> replacing an existing 5.1 with
> another 5.1 is not easy to understand. That's why I suggested to
> skip number 5.1 (say, rename the current 5.1 to 5.7) and also
> skip number 5.2 (as an unstable version following the non-existing
> 5.1 is 5.3 which then leads to 5.4).
>

For external people (ie who install grass and use it) 5.0->5.4,
5.7,5.8->6.0 makes one wonder what happened to 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, or if
there were 5.3.x releases (development), what happened to 5.1 and 5.2.

Users should never rely on version numbers in CVS, and surely 5.1.1 is
no more confusing than 5.3.1 if they though 5.1.0 was going to be the
new vector code?

But you have to decide who it's more important not to confuse, and who
you are more likely to confuse ...

Regards,
Buchan

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