firefox 1.0.5?

[James Livingston]

On Fri, 2005-07-15 at 14:12 +1000, bike_oz wrote:
> c) if other apps/sites use the version no. to determine if a product
> has a specific capability or fix then this can be very confusing and
> non-productive for end users (particularly the less technical ones) to
> try and work around.
>
> To me this means there may be a need to do versioning in a different
> way to traditional apps that are designed, built and released by one
> firm.  I'm sure this is too simplistic and therefore not workable in
> the long run but maybe open source software should have 2 version
> numbers. A security level and a feature level. Then site admins and
> others can use either or both numbers where necessary to determine if
> an application has the required capabilities.

This is still going to have a few problems; take Firefox as the example:

What security version is it if we are are feature version 1.0.2, and
have some (but not all) of the security fixes from 1.0.5?
A more complex example: what if we have all the fixes from 1.0.5, but
not some from 1.0.4 (as they are not applicable to Ubuntu)?


The real solution is not to do things like the firefox website did, and
try to use version numbers to detect the presence of security fixes.
Although doing version number detection makes a fair bit of sense for
Windows and Mac OS, because (basically) everyone gets their apps from
mozilla.org, it doesn't make sense for most Linux users (who use a
distro-provided build of the app).

A possibility is to have a flag which indicates whether it is a
distro-provided version; if it is set, then don't warn about needing to
upgrade to get security fixes, because a) they might have the fixes,
even with the lower version number and b) they aren't going to be able
to upgrade until their distro releases a new build anyway. Using the
downloadable installer version, when you have a distro version installed
can cause issues.


Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston 
-- 
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..." 
    -- Isaac Asimov
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