Noah L. Meyerhans wrote:
> And just what was it that made those releases minor? There was no logic
> behind it, it was totally arbitrary. I'd be willing to bet that over
> 90% of the packages in Debian were changed between any one of those
> minor releases. Plus you must consider all of the new packages
> available. The same holds true for a major release like woody.
There was a clear distinction between minor and major releases. Major
releases made changes that impacted every peice of software on the
system; minor releases did not.
1.1 was a major release due to ELF (NB: would have been 1.0)
1.2 was not as the distribution only grew and changed
1.3 likewise
2.0 was a major release due to glibc
2.1 was not as the distribution only grew and changed
2.2 likewise
3.0 was a major release due to an arbitrary decision of the release manager,
but that's the first time that happened. I hope you're not trying to
perpetuate that.
It doesn't really matter what percentage of the packages changed in
minor releases[1], the distinction is that in a major release, all (or
all compiled anyway) packages *had* to be changed, in one specific and
significant way that involved a significant transitoon plan. Using a
major release number was also historically a good way to give notice to
our users that the upgrade would be especially involved.
--
see shy jo
[1] Though I suspect we have not hit 90% modificaton for at least half
of all our releases.
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