Fresh wind for openSUSE (The H)

[Posted September 15, 2011 by corbet]

The H talks with Andreas Jaeger at the openSUSE Conference in Nuremberg. "However, 'zero versions' reportedly tend to be regarded as 'major updates' and generate a high level of expectation among users. Apparently, this has repeatedly given rise to the opinion that a version wasn't ready for release, and that it contained too few new features for a zero release. Internally, the openSUSE team has never treated the zero versions as major releases, said Jaeger. The developers therefore decided to skip the 'zero release' and not release a version 12.0."

Fresh wind for openSUSE (The H)

Posted Sep 15, 2011 22:56 UTC (Thu) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (8 responses)

I think they should have innovated and gone for negative minor versions. Releasing OpenSUSE 12.-8 would mean that it's actually a step backward from OpenSUSE 11 and thus conform with the typical reality of linux distribution evolution.

Fresh wind for openSUSE (The H)

Posted Sep 16, 2011 8:19 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (7 responses)

A cruel assessment for an unreleased distribution version. I suspect you have had very bad upgrade experiences recently, to be so grumpy. Personally I find distros going up and down, and you never know which it is until you actually try a version. Figuring out how to avoid disappointments, while still introducing valuable new technologies would be a worthy goal for distros.

Fresh wind for openSUSE (The H)

Posted Sep 16, 2011 8:44 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (6 responses)

I thought the comment was just being generally cynical, not complaining specifically about this release, or SuSE.

Fresh wind for openSUSE (The H)

Posted Sep 16, 2011 10:57 UTC (Fri) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (1 responses)

I thought it was poking fun at the inevitable(?) deluge of "That does it! They broke $SOME_MINOR_THING! Quality is going down. After using $DISTRO for $N years, I'm now going back to Windows/OSX/$ANOTHER_DISTRO/$VERSION(X-1)/etc."

Fresh wind for openSUSE (The H)

Posted Sep 16, 2011 12:59 UTC (Fri) by tcourbon (guest, #60669) [Link]

It's fun how people react when their distribution of choice break. When my distribution is broken I do have an almost irresistible surge to throw my computer through the nearest window and certainly not launching Windows on my computer.

Fresh wind for openSUSE (The H)

Posted Sep 16, 2011 13:13 UTC (Fri) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (3 responses)

10 points! It was just a joke.

I was unable to take this news item seriously. The argument is basically that because users expect too much from a x.0 release, we just go straight to x.1 release. But look! 12.1 has even larger numbers than 12.0. How could it possibly be true that users expect less from 12.1 than from 12.0?

Fresh wind for openSUSE (The H)

Posted Sep 16, 2011 14:06 UTC (Fri) by anandrajan (guest, #146) [Link] (2 responses)

Disclaimer: I use openSUSE as my desktop/server distro.

I think the reasoning is something like this: .0 releases scare some people who expect things to be broken and therefore wait for the .1 release. .0 releases excite some people who jump in expecting lots of new features. Since openSUSE is continuously evolving, there seemed to be no reason to get expectations and fear factors up with .0 releases, ergo the counter begins from 1 and not 0. Perhaps this version numbering is akin to Prozac which also cuts out the highs and the lows :-).

Fresh wind for openSUSE (The H)

Posted Sep 16, 2011 15:19 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Perhaps they should go back to the YaST 1 versioning scheme :-)

Fresh wind for openSUSE (The H)

Posted Oct 3, 2011 19:16 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

Well, that's as may be, but the *reality* is "first point release in the new major revision" is the quantity that people are scared of, not actually ".0".

But alas, that's what I'm coming to expect. After a nice long run (since 8.x, I think), it may be time for me to re-evaluate my distro of choice; the strategic decision-making is going progressively down hill.

Fresh wind for openSUSE (The H)

Posted Sep 17, 2011 11:06 UTC (Sat) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

Seems like the Ubuntu solution (use date.month as version number) or Fedora's (don't use minor version numbers, period) would be less confusing.

Fresh wind for openSUSE (The H)

Posted Sep 18, 2011 9:59 UTC (Sun) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]

That's exactly the perception people had for Mandriva version with spring and regular releases, despites having no specific focus on stability or anything.
The same could be said for kernel 3.0 vs 2.6.39 or 2.6.38 ( http://forum.mandriva.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=135... ). Or the whole firefox numbering changes some times ago.

Fresh wind for openSUSE (The H)

Posted Oct 3, 2011 19:17 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

> 'zero versions' reportedly tend to be regarded as 'major updates'

Thank you, Colonel Obvious: of *course* .0 is a major update, coming as it necessarily does in lockstep with "we bumped the major version to its left".