It definitely matters.

Posted Apr 4, 2008 15:10 UTC (Fri) by beoba (guest, #16942)
In reply to: um... by elanthis
Parent article: OpenSSH 5.0 released

In many cases, yes. For example, Python 3.x is not planned to be compatible with 2.x. Same
with PHP 4.x vs PHP 5.x, or Apache 1.x vs Apache 2.x. There are lots of cases where a change
in major version number means "features have changed, you will need to reconfigure".

I'd much rather be able to just follow standard version syntax rather than have to memorize
which incremental updates are the ones that are likely to disrupt things. Who wants to spend
their time memorizing that foo 1.2 -> 1.3 involves a complete rewrite, while foo 1.3 -> 1.4 is
only fixing some documentation?

Heck, even a date-string (foo-YYYYMMDD) would be more useful, because then you'd at least get
some indication of "this is the first release in a year, so there are likely some major
changes".

It definitely matters.

Posted Apr 4, 2008 15:45 UTC (Fri) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Indeed. I would be much more careful to upgrade from 4.9 to 5.0 than from 5.0 to 5.1 or 5.1 to
5.1.1, yet it seems for OpenSSH you can simply never tell the size of the changes by version
number... Which is pretty annoying.

It definitely matters.

Posted Apr 4, 2008 15:47 UTC (Fri) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (2 responses)

Another example: OpenSSH 1.x -> OpenSSH 2.x.  Of course, they were following the lead of
commercial SSH in this.

It definitely matters.

Posted Apr 5, 2008 7:37 UTC (Sat) by djm (subscriber, #11651) [Link] (1 responses)

Cranking the major version mattered back when we were making major functional improvements or
incompatible change. OpenSSH 2.0 brought in SSH protocol version 2 support for the first time.
OpenSSH 3.0 changed some defaults in a way that could affect some users.

Nowadays OpenSSH is a mature product, so we just increment the version when we do a timed
(~every 6 months) release.

It definitely matters.

Posted Apr 6, 2008 22:13 UTC (Sun) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Thankyou for the multiple explanations djm.