Interviewed by CNN on 15/07/2011 10:41, hawker told the world: > 2) I'm just curious about versioning. Perhaps I just don't understand > fully what changed. From what I understand 2.1 has a decent number of > changes. It perhaps should have been 2.5 not 2.1. But what I don't > understand is I thought 2.2 was 2.1 with bug fixes. It came out very > fast after 2.1. Why is 2.2 not 2.1.1 or some such? What major changes > under the hood happened?
OK. The Mozilla organization recently changed the update philosophy, from a traditional development model to what has been nicknamed the "rapid-release train." Seamonkey, while strictly speaking is not part of the Mozilla organization, is closely related to it and highly dependent on the Firefox and Thunderbird projects. Therefore, it went along, partly because it's easier to sync efforts if both are in the same model. I have compared in the past the two development models to the publishing business: the traditional model is akin to writing a reference textbook, where you spend a long time researching the new edition while your publisher releases new printings of the old edition with minor updates and corrections for typos. The rapid-release train is more like publishing a periodical reference guide, such as a restaurant guide (perhaps the sort some newspapers give away every month) -- you don't expect it to be entirely rewritten every month, but there are always SOME changes. And you don't go back to press to correct typos on the May edition either, since the June edition will be ready pretty soon. Essentially, the rapid-release train does away with the distinction between "major" and "minor" versions -- it's somewhat in the middle: every release there's some improvement, and every release there are bugfixes too. There's also the cathedral-and-bazaar philosophies involved. The traditional model was developed for "cathedral" organizations, and carries with it some of the old assumptions -- that having all the changes released in a big lump is better than giving them out one at a time (this is specially attractive for commercial software companies, since big changes help enticing the customer into paying for upgrade fees), that distribution of new versions is slow and expensive, and so on. But Mozilla is a collective, free (in both senses) software project. The "bazaar" approach is probably a better model of what is really happening. And one of the maxims of the bazaar model is "release early, release often." And that's what's happening now. As for the version numbers themselves... they become pretty meaningless, despite the obvious (higher is newer). There are no clear distinctions between "major" and "minor" versions. Mozilla and Chrome went with "major" versions numbering, Seamonkey went with "minor" numbering, and some organizations use a somewhat-hybrid "year.month" numbering (which I, personally, think is the sanest long-term scheme). Third-level version numbers (x.x.1) are still used sometimes, for what Mozilla calls a "chemspill" release (and Seamonkey calls an "oilspill") -- a fix for a bug so serious it CANNOT wait for the next cycle. But those are special cases, not to be considered in the normal release schedule. As for your more specific question, "why is it 2.2 instead of 2.1.1.?" Well, yes, the Seamonkey part of it was mostly bugfixes. However, the underlying Gecko engine (which comes from Mozilla) has new features, which are listed on the Release Notes. So, Seamonkey gets those new features too. So it's a valid version increment. -- MCBastos This message has been protected with the 2ROT13 algorithm. Unauthorized use will be prosecuted under the DMCA. -=-=- ... Sent from The Voices in My Head. *Added by TagZilla 0.066.2 running on Seamonkey 2.1 * Get it at http://xsidebar.mozdev.org/modifiedmailnews.html#tagzilla _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
