Am 31.05.2013 22:56, schrieb Wietse Venema: > After the confusion that Postfix 2.10 is not Postfix 2.1, maybe it > is time to change the release numbering scheme.
Glad you are asking. No, it is not the time to join in brainless version numbering races. Tell people those are independent numbers with a particular meaning (major, minor, patch/bugfixlevel), link to a "how to read Postfix's version numbers" document from 1. the download page, 2. from the FAQ's front page, 3. from Postfix's web front page, and, as proposed in this thread, 4. from postconf and possibly 5. postfix manual pages; and if that does not suffice, consider it an intelligence test as to who should _not_ be operating a mail transfer agent because he or she cannot handle the complexities. Possibly add "2.1 -> 2.2 -> 2.9 -> 2.10 -> future 2.11" figure so people see quickly that 2.10 was newer than 2.9 and 2.1... > or we could do it like Sun. After releasing Solaris 2.0 .. 2.6, > they changed the numbering scheme with Solaris 7 which was released > way back in 1998. Nowadays, many software distributions change the > major release number frequently, if not every time. Is there a _technical_ reason (undereducation on a part of the users does not count) to follow Google's useless race of versioning that makes major version numbers pointless (oh, and Google does have four-component version numbering..., and Mozilla stuck to three-component in spite of joining the race)? Why sacrifice the semantic value of "if major version changes, check for major incompatibilities"? What do we gain? > If we were to change the release numbering scheme like this with > Postfix then we would immediately be free from the pain of getting > sites to adopt Postfix 3.0, because they would no longer expect the > pain of transitioning from Python 2->3, from perl 5->6 and the like. > The next Postfix release would be 11.0, so 3.x would never happen. My vote is "keep the versioning system", and explain it. Else it will take ages until distributions adopt the new system, causing two or so years of even more confusion. And I must say that I have always appreciated the excellent compatibility and release documentation Postfix has provided - thanks for your keeping this up for ever since the first formal release, I value such consistency over changing version numbering schemes to accommodate a few inattentive people.
