Re: Understanding versioning.
On Tue, 08 Nov 2011 15:56:02 -0500, Rick Thomas wrote:
> On Nov 8, 2011, at 2:07 AM, Sthu Deus wrote:
>
>> it seems to me to be weird having those "epoches"
>
> If all software developers were "well behaved" and they all co- operated
> in their versioning, it would be weird to have "epochs". All versions,
> from all sources, would be monotonically increasing as a function of
> time.
>
> But, as we know, software developers are an independent bunch of
> cowboys. Sometimes, for reasons that seem good and reasonable to the
> individual upstream developer involved, software version time seems to
> run backwards. "Epochs" are there so the rest of us (who aren't
> upstream developers) can pretend it didn't do that -- when the
> developers glitch their versions, we just move into a different epoch
> and go on about our lives.
It might be less confusing for the uninitiated though, if the term used
were "incarnation" rather than "epoch"; at least IMHO. Especially so in
the light of the other *nix use of the term epoch regarding time.
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