On Wed, Jun 05, 2002 at 11:27:50AM -0400, Matthew Weier O'Phinney wrote: > Okay, so this has really nothing to do with the development or use of a > window manager, but it's something I've been curious about in my 2.5+ > years of Linux experience: > > Why do most of the good X window managers have 0.xx versions after years > of development? > > For example, I've used Enlightenment (various versions from 0.14.x > through 0.16.5), WindowMaker (from versions 0.75 - 0.80.0), and > currently BlackBox (various 0.6x versions). Why have none of them > released a 1.x or above? > > I realize in part that most of these are under heavy or semi-heavy > development all the time, but they also all are _very_ stable. Much more > stable than kwm was when I tried it (admittedly, that was two years ago) > or Sawmill/Sawfish, etc. XFCE has been in the 3.x series for awhile, and > still has fairly heavy development and constant releases (I used this > for over a year when I was using my laptop heavily -- obviously this was > before I found blackbox!). > > What are the developers' thoughts on the matter?
1.0-type releases matter only on projects which have a long roadmap that is tied around that version number. That type of software usually undergoes a discrete devel cycle, where, when version 0.8 is reached for example, a feature freeze happens, and 0.9.x versions are bugfix releases, 1.0 being the stable release. Mozilla is a good example for this. 0.8 was obviously less stable than 0.9, which was less stable than the current rc releases. This doesn't happen for small OSS projects, because they don't use the version number in their devel strategy, since there really isn't a discrete roadmap that encompasses long, planned periods of development. It's more like "it's in my TODO. I'll get to it when I get to it." Also, a lot of these projects are pet projects which also serve as learning experiences for the developers; which means that they don't know what's gonna happen at 1.0, since they don't yet have the skills to know how they will handle/code/manage the state of the project that far ahead. I agree that "whole-number releases" have psychological value, but people unlearn it quickly after they have dealt with OSS for a certain amount of time. > Matthew
