Hi there,
The chances of people in this mailing list misunderstanding that convention are
low, because by and large we're advocates of free software which is
predominantly released under such numbering schemes, but I feel confident I
could take that convention around the engineering office I work in and confuse
a whole lot of otherwise very intelligent people. The (un)washed masses are
used to titles such as 'Office 2007', 'Word 2003', and dare I say it, 'Flight
Simulator 2004'. Those names give some kind of meaning, whereas "Flightgear
1.9.2" to a lay person (no matter how intelligent) probably would not mean a
lot.
FG to me is more developer-driven than user-driven, and I would also think devs
make up a significant proportion of the user base. Devs would be more likely to
be using cvs than stable 1.9.1 as their daily tester/flyer. So long as cvs
keeps working the way it does I cannot see any problem with keeping the scheme
intact for development, but simplifying the fg name a bit for major releases,
since that only happens pretty much annually. How about 'Flightgear 2010' for
the next stable release? Might spark a bit more user interest in the project by
having a more human name for milestone releases...
Just my $0.02 worth again...
Regards,
Chris Wilkinson, YBBN/BNE.
________________________________
From: Stefan Seifert <n...@detonation.org>
To: FlightGear developers discussions <flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>
Sent: Mon, 14 December, 2009 6:40:32 PM
Subject: Re: [Flightgear-devel] Version number for the upcoming release
On Monday 14 December 2009 05:46:11 Chris Wilkinson wrote:
> There could have been any number of better ways to express the version
> number, but they chose to use one that can combine more than one decimal
> place into what looks to a lay person like a mistyped number... not
> clever.
Well they chose major and minor version numbers delimited by a dot, which can
and is easily extended to even finer granularity by just adding another group
or two. It's certainly no perfect system, but it's been adopted in practically
the whole computer industry, software and hardware. So FlightGear is in fairly
good company there.
The chances that someone would misunderstand this universally adopted scheme
are quite small if you ask me. People seem to cope with it quite well, as they
do with IPv4 addresses which are usually written as four groups of numbers
seperated by the same dot: 123.45.67.089
And anyway: here in Europe (except for the UK and Ireland), we don't even use
a dot as decimal separator. We use the comma while the dot is used for
grouping thousands. And it's the same in many other parts of the world, for
example South America.
So what's wrong again with using the same system that just about everyone else
uses?
Stefan
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