Re: Mirrors et al.
On Sun, 28 Apr 1996, Bruce Perens wrote:
> > Is it necessary to have future versions of Debian at all ?
>
> Not if you have FTP. If you get it by CD it's nice to have version
> numbers and to be able to know exactly what you have if you say 1.3 .
> The "unstable" directory or something like it will continue to have
> the moving-target version of Debian for FTP users. I plan on releases
> every three months for the CD crowd.
Why have 0.93, 1.1, 1.2 version numbers at all?
Why not have version numbers like: 960429, 960615, 960722 etc.
CD manufactures want version numbers? Fine, they can have them. YYMMDD
of whatever day they cut the CD. YYMMDD is the only date format that
sorts properly...so I use it for everything.
Who else *needs* a version number for Debian? I don't. I don't care. All
I care about is the version numbers of the individual packages I've
installed, and I can check those at any time with 'dpkg -l'
Admittedly, the difference between 0.93 and 1.1 is pretty important
but after 1.1 is released, the debian version number wont matter at
all. It's irrelevant...e.g. I might have installed 1.1 a year ago, but
upgraded nearly all the packages so that i'm running mostly the same as
what's on the current 1.3 release. What version am i running in that
case? If I call for tech support, the support guy should ask 'what
version of package foobar do you have installed?' rather than 'what
version of debian do you have?'
this is one of the features of the dpkg software - we should promote it
as such.
(another feature of YYMMDD version numbers...slackware, redhat, et
al will never catch up. we'll always have a higher version number.
hahahahah. what's a puny version three to version ninety-six thousand??
nothing! no, i'm not being at all serious with this comment :-)
Craig
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