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Re: Proposal: Debian release numbers



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On Wed, 08 Jan 2003 16:44, Don Armstrong wrote:
> On Wed, 08 Jan 2003, Corrin Lakeland wrote:
> > Personally I prefer just calling things by the year they're
> > released and forgetting about version numbers entirely.

> and no one has really given any decent technical (or even social)
> reason why we shouldn't stick with the status quo.

Say someone new to Linux goes to the library and sees in the catalogue 
copies of RH6 and Debian 3. Which is the more recent? Say they pick RH6 
and get it installed, compared to their XP installation it looks old 
and primitive. With years instead of versions, this problem is avoided.

You can't say this doesn't happen.  Lots of people I know had heard 
about linux and picked up a CD at a bargain clearance table, and were 
then promptly put off. Stupid perhaps, but predictable. If they knew 
they were installing Debian 98, then they'd be prepared for something 
different to installing Debian 03, in a way that simply seeing v4.0 
cannot do.

Of course, there are problems with my suggestion. You mentioned it makes 
version numbers longer, and that it prevents two releases in the one 
year. For general software there is also the problem that there is no 
way to tell how stable/mature it is, though I don't see that as being 
such a problem here.

Corrin
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