[asterisk-users] Opinions on Release Numbering

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 12:54:42PM -0500, Russell Bryant wrote:
> What is your opinion?  I certainly want the release naming to be as obvious as
> possible.

Wikipedia has something to say on this (by which, of course, I mean me
:-)...

The traditional approach to this is, roughly

1.5.8
1.5.9
1.5.10
1.5.11 == 1.6a1
1.6a2
1.6a3
1.6a4 == 1.6b1
1.6b2
1.6b3
1.6b4 == 1.6rc1
1.6rc2
1.6rc3 == 1.6.0
1.6.1
1.6.2
...

The important points (IME) are these:

1) the first release of a transition level is exactly equivalent to the
differently numbered release it replaces.  This is most important
coming out of Release Candidates: you *must not make any changes*
between your last RC and your production release.  If you do, it's
really another beta.  (The common distinction between betas and RC's is
that betas are permitted new features, but RC's come after the feature
freeze, and aren't.)

2) If you promote a level, and it turns out not to be robust enough to
support it, you can either demote it and try again, or just march ahead
and fix the bugs, but you can't reuse a version number for different
code.

3) Version numbers serve 2 purposes: they're a contract with the user
about the expectations they can have reasonably about the release as it
sits -- if I see something that's an RC2 coming off 5 betas, then I can
make some assumptions about how stable and reliable I think that code's
likely to be -- if the release manager hasn't een playing fast and
loose with the numbering.  (Specifically, if you make any changes
between your last beta and your first RC, then it's not really an RC;
it's another beta.)

And secondly, they're a contract between users and technical support,
so that TS knows *exactly* what code base the user has and can debug
problems reliably -- which is even more critical in the open source
world where your TS team is other users than it is in commercial
software.

Just my thoughts from observation of 25 years of development...

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink                      jra at baylink.com
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