Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!decvax!tektronix!reed!bart
From: bart@reed.UUCP (Bart Massey)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Naming conventions for system releases and updates
Message-ID: <9637@reed.UUCP>
Date: 21 Jun 88 05:27:02 GMT
References: <2290@quacky.mips.COM> <9453@reed.UUCP> <340@proxftl.UUCP>
Reply-To: bart@reed.UUCP (Bart Massey)
Organization: Reed College, Portland OR
Lines: 37

In article <340@proxftl.UUCP> bill@proxftl.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes
about a fairly typical software version numbering scheme of the form

	.

where the first two are integers and the last is a letter.

(BTW, your scheme uses the exact same version numbering format as Apple
Computer's, but the meaning of each of the fields is completely different.
This could easily lead to confusion on my part, as I've dealt with Apple's
scheme a lot.)

> Since our system gives some information within the number
> itself, this is a better system than simply numbering each
> release.
>
> Unadorned numbers are harder to remember and contain less
> information than segmented numbers; this is why people tend to
> use the latter.

Unadorned numbers are sometimes hard to remember, although you probably have
unintentionally memorized about 10-15 3-digit numbers already, in the form
of telephone prefixes, simply by repeated use.  However, what I suggested in
my original posting was unadorned integers plus a change log.  These two
together give all the information you need, without having to trust your
memory at all.

If you're worried about mnemonicity, maybe you want to manually or
automatically generate a mnemonic name for significant version numbers (e.g.
"released" versions in a commercial environment) -- this isn't terribly
hard.  Thus, (e.g.) references to "version 123-duck" refer to the version
named "duck", but numbered 123, as do references to "that duck version", but
the integer and change log are still completely unambiguous in giving you
all necessary info...

						Bart Massey
						UUCP: ..tektronix!reed!bart