Large version numbers [LWN.net]

Large version numbers

Posted Nov 9, 2011 12:47 UTC (Wed) by robbe (guest, #16131)
In reply to: Large version numbers by ekj
Parent article: Firefox 8 released

Multi-part dates (or version numbers, to give some semblance of being on-topic) seem to be easier to parse than unstructured ones.

Quick: if I invite you to an outdoors event on 2012 day 222, will you need to bring your jacket? I guess we could start to remember key day numbers (e.g. "frost recedes around 74", "324 is our anniversary"), but I think we more easily remember day-month combinations than three-digit numbers.

The days-since-the-epoch scheme is insane.

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Large version numbers

Posted Nov 9, 2011 12:59 UTC (Wed) by ekj (guest, #1524) [Link]

I dunno about that. you can skip the last digit in the year if you care only about season, you're thus left with 36 10-day periods, I guess that granularity is a little high, but I don't think it's a *lot* harder.

Do you need a jacket for an event at 22/36 of a year isn't much harder than Do you need a jacket for an event at 8/12 of a year which is the current system.

Multi-part version-number can confuse too; I've seen several people be confused about what is better: 2.27 and 2.3 if you read them as decimals, you'll end up thinking that 2.3 is the higher number thus the newest version.