Opposed (Re: Debian release versioning)
I was in favour at first sight, but not anymore. I agree with Adeodato
that in general, the second integer of a software version is more
meaningful that a stable update means. Also, as he wrote, it used to
mean something entirely different in Debian itself, less than 4 years ago.
But at least equally importantly, a stable update is not really a new
Debian version. When you're running software foo version X.Y and X.Y+1
comes out, you'd expect to have an update to do. This is generally not
the case with Debian, or it shouldn't. "stable" rather evolves
progressively, and a machine updating regularly may see no update or new
package in a stable update. The main meaning of a stable update is that
installation media is updated. This is quite similar to d-i releases,
which aren't reflected in debian_version.
So, I think the Debian version should be simply X. Installation media
should reflect the build, with something appended to the Debian version,
similar to how it's done now. Maybe "Debian 6 image build X"? revision
is not too clear, but I'm not sure how it could be improved. This is
basically what we're already doing, except the ".0" is dropped. The only
disadvantage with keeping ".0" is that some users will wonder what it
means. Perhaps lenny+1 will be announced as "Debian 6".
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