| The version numbers used for released version of Hugs are unfortunate (at
| best!), because the version number is not sufficient to identify a major
or
| minor release.
| ...
| Hence, in a bug report I recently submitted a few minutes ago regarding
| Fran, I had to decribe Hugs not by its version number, but by its
| (approximate) release date: "Hugs 1.4 of June 1998", to make it clear
that
| I had the version of Hugs which includes Fran 1.12.
The problem here is that you (and many others too) see "Hugs 1.4" and think
that this is a program called "Hugs", whose version number is "1.4". In
fact,
it is a program called "Hugs 1.4"; if you want to specify which version,
then
you need to specify the date tag. So we don't follow the
conventions/traditions
of many others, but I still think our naming convention is pretty good. A
major
release has a name of the form: "Hugs xxx Month Year", where xxx is a code
(1.3, 1.4, or 98) telling you which version of Haskell is supported, and the
date part tells you in which month it was released (we will never have more
than
one major release in any given month). A minor release has a name of the
form "Hugs xxx yymmdd", which tells you exactly when it was released (we
will
never do more than one minor release on any given day).
These version numbers seem much more informative than otherwise arbitrary
names like version 1.3c or 2.30b, or 1.5.01, etc. Names like these have
no intrinsic semantics.
You are right that there is a potential problem if we discover a severe bug
in
a major release just days after it is released: what name do we give to the
`quick fix' release. But hopefully, the sequence of betas that precede any
such
release, and the testing that they enjoy will help to reduce the chance of
such
problems. As a backup plan, perhaps we should make it policy to release
major
versions of Hugs only within the last few days of the month :-)
Another positive step that has already been adopted for future releases is
to
label the date tag more clearly as the version number in the startup banner.
With luck, this will help to reduce confusion over version numbers and names
in the days to come ...
All the best,
Mark
