Rationale for the current numbering scheme

[Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@datasync.com>]

Hi,

	There has been a lot of confusion about the numbering scheme
 followed by Debian, with accusations of deception and counter
 accusations flying around, and there has been little said about why
 the scheme works, and why it is not a temporary hack.

 Problem: A number of users, forst time or otherwise, require CD's in
    order to sue Debian at all.  In a number of countries online
    charges are onerous enough that downloading Debianover the net is
    just not practical. 

    Since it is a hardcship to our users if there is no silver CD of
    the Debian distribution, the project took upon itself to see how
    it could facilitate the process.

 Problem: CD manufaturers are not in the business to lose money. The
	economics of the trade are such that one needs to order and
	run of batches of CD's in the thousands in order to make a
	profit. It is estimated that two or three months are required
	between CD releases to make the enterprise proftable

 Fact: Debian releases happen more than 3 months apart

 Fact: Debian releases, which involve a freeze, and testing, involve
       only major.minor version changes

 Fact: security updates are made in between releases. These are
       revision changes only

 Solution: Have the official CD's only every Debian release (one CD
           every code named release). The minimum period is met, and
           the updates are small enough that most people can update
           throgh the net (in other words, the lack of a CD is an
           major hardship for fewer people). Also, if there are a
           significant number of revisios, or the size of the updated
           packages gets large, we can have update cd's (kinda like
           microsoft service packs).

 
	The silver CD vendors approached the project leader and asked
 Debian to make the distiction between major.minor upgrades (which are
 significant events) and revision updates (minor changes, security
 fixes only for the most part) by saying that it is debian release
 <major>.<minor>, r<revision>. 

	We decided to do so, without ever explicitly ruling out 2.0 r1
 CD's. The expectation is that most vendors would have just 2.0 CD's,
 and that is OK.

	This is a compromise, since the security updates are not
 available on CD. However, this is better than having no silver CD's
 at all.

	manoj

-- 
 Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters in life
 begin when you get what you want.  -- Irving Kristol
Manoj Srivastava  <srivasta@acm.org> <http://www.datasync.com/%7Esrivasta/>
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