GNOME's new versioning scheme

Posted Sep 18, 2020 1:19 UTC (Fri) by IanKelling (subscriber, #89418)
Parent article: GNOME's new versioning scheme

I like the change.

GNOME's new versioning scheme

Posted Sep 18, 2020 1:45 UTC (Fri) by koh (subscriber, #101482) [Link] (3 responses)

I do not.

Any reasons?

GNOME's new versioning scheme

Posted Sep 20, 2020 18:50 UTC (Sun) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link] (2 responses)

People are bad at remembering big numbers. After some point they look all the same.
People more easily remember 4.2 than 42, and at least they will remember it is 4.something
while they will mix 52,62 and 72.

GNOME's new versioning scheme

Posted Sep 21, 2020 10:07 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

People more easily remember 4.2 than 42

I'm not sure. One trick to remember numbers is to "relate" the number to something else - I mean 42 is the number of the bus line used to go around here. (19)62 is the date when Brazil won its second soccer World Cup. 72 is the number of a road near lake Balaton. But what is 4.2?

GNOME's new versioning scheme

Posted Sep 21, 2020 10:57 UTC (Mon) by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248) [Link]

Doesn't the same reasoning apply to the minor component? Maybe even more so?

Going from 42 to 85 vs 3.42 to 3.85 doesn't seem to make much difference to me. In fact, I'd argue that the first example is easier to remember due to the tenths changing. Of course that advantage goes away once you're above 100, e.g. from 142 to 185 will likely be as easy (or hard) to remember as 3.42 to 3.85.

Now going from 82 to 85 vs 3.82 to 3.85: here I don't see it making any difference at all.

Another point: staying with a major.minor scheme and keeping the same major for an extensive period of time could also lead to false sense of the project not changing much, thinking "oh it's still v3" about going from 3.42 to 3.85 while the project might actually have changed drastically.

I think my point is that there are advantages and disadvantages to every scheme. As long as numbers go up, I don't care that much. When I have projects for which I need to care about the semantics of their versioning, I need to learn about their scheme and act accordingly. With every project, 'cause there simply isn't any one standard (yeah yeah, semantic versioning, but I still need to determine if a project follows that scheme in the first place).