Noel J. Bergman wrote: >Alex Karasulu wrote: > > >>However I'd like to take this opportunity to clear up some potential >>misunderstanding or miscommunication regarding our version numbers. >>This release is not a stable (production grade) release. A memory leak >>is just fine for odd minor numbered releases. >> >> > >This use of odd/even numbering to have a quality semantic may well be >confusing to people. The HTTP server project mentions alpha, beta and GA >releases. Jakarta projects refer to "builds", as in nightly, milestone, >beta and Release. A "Release Build" is like a GA release. I'd suggest >considering one of those, or something in reasonably common usage. > > We actually did consider these other models from a number of classifications. Surprisingly we were diligent this one time :) and researched the release models before selecting one. We did not invent this even/odd model, the Linux Kernel community did. For example, one of several influencial peices of research we encountered, was from our very own Justin Erenkrantz. Justin's paper[1] helped finalize our decision to adopting the Linux Kernel model. Even minor numbers for kernels like 1.2, 1.4, 2.2, 2.4 ... etc represent stable kernel releases. Odd ones like the 1.3, 2.3 and 2.5 kernels represent unstable releases of the kernel due mostly to new feature additions. Immediately I know the stability of the kernel by its minor release version number. The minor number is really a branch number. Justin sites these benefits and talks about others as well in his paper. I agree people don't immediately know off the bat which model we use. Regardless of the release model selected, we still have to tell users about it. It is best to stick to whatever model we have chosen and educate users. The model makes little difference to us however rehashing the release model once it has been chosen does cost us in terms of enegy and confusion. -Alex [1] http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wscacchi/Papers/Open-Source-Research/OSSE3-Erenkrantz.pdf