Observed confusion over the release version numbering system

On Tue, Nov 08, 2005 at 02:12:13PM -0800, Scott Ritchie wrote:
> While looking to help support users on the Wine mailing list, today I
> got this email:
> 
> "I installed wine 0.9 in Ubuntu linux 5.1, it works, I notice that those
> native programs running under Ubuntu has a nice font, is it possible to
> change the font of those programs running under Wine too? thanks."
> 
> Now, it took me a while to figure out that this user was running Breezy,
> and he was misinterpreting 5.10 as 5.1, which actually sounds like a
> rather reasonable mistake now that I think about it.  Worse, 5.1 or
> 5.1.0, as 5.10 may be mistaken for, is actually a newer version than
> 5.4, and this will likely lead to further confusion again in the future,
> particularly as we get new users completely unfamiliar with the
> intricacies of software version numbering.

This was an unfortunate consequence of the early transition we made from a
March/September cycle to an April/October cycle.  I regularly see the
trailing '0' dropped in these circumstances.  Fortunately, it's still
unambiguous, so it's simple for someone more knowledgeable to infer the
author's intent.

> Not that I enjoy opening a can of worms, but might I suggest that we
> consider using a more intuitive version numbering system?
> 
> One idea comes to mind, and from what I can see this is the least
> different yet still intuitive approach we could do.  Simply keep the
> major version number as the year, but instead give the minor version
> number as the ordered release number for that year.  So, our first
> release in 2006 would be 6.1, our second 6.2, and so forth.

I don't think this is more intuitive, but it is less ambiguous in that it
has no trailing zeroes, and as such would address some of the concerns you
raised above (which I share).  I'm not sure, however, that it's worth the
inconvenience and added confusion of changing our version numbering scheme
mid-stream.

-- 
 - mdz