version numbers

From: Ray Plante <rplante-at-poplar.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2004 15:22:11 -0600 (CST)


Hi Bob, Markus, Marco,

I know I should have said something earlier, so feel free to say, "it's too late to change it."

Thanks for the acknowledgement in the Guidelines Note regarding version numbers; however, you modified my suggestion in toward a direction I was trying to get away from. The convention of having 0.21 come between 0.2 and 0.22 has a real problem: you only get ten revisions of a particular level. What comes after 0.99 if you are not ready for 1.0? 0.991? Or are you out of luck? The result is that you no longer have a sense of how major a change the revision is.

The point of *my* saying "fields on either side of the period (.) are integers" is to say that 3 comes between 2 and 4, and 21 come between 20 and 22. All increments between a set of periods are considered the same level of change.

This is how RCS, CVS, and probably most other revision control systems work.

cheers,
Ray Received on 2004-03-31Z21:22:29