Re: Woody version number

["Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@galactic.demon.co.uk>]

Read the archives for the sad history of version numbers and the flamewars :)

Please remember that the reason we went to using version names was prompted
by Debian 1.0.  [For those that don't know: Debian was at something like
0.97 when a vendor [?? Infomagic ??] released a prerelease snapshot which
was broken in many ways as "Debian 1.0" Debian had to bump to 1.1]

The reason for the sub-versioning 2.2r2 etc. was originally prompted
by CD vendors who wanted to be sure that they were pressing the latest
and greatest Debian.  Despite _heated_ arguments at the time, it has
proved useful to have sub version mumbers - otherwise we'd have had
to bump version numbers fairly regularly.  The argument may now be
academic, anyway, since few vendors would press hundreds of Debian
disks anymore and the much wider availability of CD recorders mean
that more people can get a current CD.  It is useful on occasion
to have "silver" CD's since these will read on almost every drive:
could we arrange a pressing to mark 3.0 (I stil have "Oficial" 1.3 CD's!)

If you think in terms of major version

1.1 - 1.3

2.0 - 2.2 (both over several years) with sub versions

3.0 - 3.3 [Woody and a bit]

4.0 [Fully FHS Debian on 8 architectures] etc. etc.

We don't want to play the numbers game, nor do we need to. It is interesting
to look back a couple of years to 1.3 and see how far we've come - also
that at least one commercial Debian variant appears to have gone by the board.

If you trust the Linux Weekly News editorial team, several other distributions
want to pull out of the distribution market and move to being service providers
[Turbolinux, S.u.S.E, Caldera and Red Hat  all mentioned].  I want to see Debianthere in the long term and we may be down to being one of the few non-commercialdistributions that it remains free to download and use.

Just my 0.02 Euro :)

Andy