[Dev] Milestone numbering going forward

[Grant Baillie]

(Trimming CC:s)

I concur vociferously with PJE & Katie.

+1 to calling the trunk 0.7M, 0.7dev,  0.7alpha, or 0.7a. (In order  
of preference; while "alpha" has a cool retro 50's sci-fi ring to it,  
for the most part I tend to associate it with "buggy and slow").

FWIW, that's how the projects I've worked on in the past have  
labelled releases. E.g. "trunk" OS builds at Apple call themselves  
10.5 (+ an internal build identifier), and 10.4.x software updates  
and security patches are done off a branch from 10.4. (Cynics might  
observe that the thing Apple will call "10.5" would more accurately  
be labelled something like "10.5dev.250" or "10.5b1" :).

--Grant

On Dec 1, 2005, at 7:58 , Phillip J. Eby wrote:

> It sounds to me from this discussion that it's not a question of  
> forward *or* backward, but forward *and* backward numbering.  If we  
> release a new version of an old branch, that's a postrelease tag on  
> the old version number.  If we release an in-development milestone  
> of a future version, that's a prerelease tag.  Whether these are  
> done from the trunk or a branch makes relatively little difference,  
> as does whether we use 0.7dev.m1 or 0.7a1 to designate a prerelease  
> milestone of 0.7.
>
> I personally find the scheme we've been using to be odd, because it  
> doesn't reflect our *goals*.  In my view, we've been working on  
> early (i.e. pre-release) versions of 0.6, and now we'll be working  
> on pre-releases of 0.7 until we're ready to release 0.7.   I don't  
> actually know what is meant in this discussion by "forward" or  
> "backward" versioning, because those terms don't make sense to me  
> either.  The numbers don't go forward or backward, we are simply  
> issuing either pre-releases or post-releases.  What we *have* been  
> doing is giving post-release version numbers for our pre-release  
> versions.  We should simply be clear about the difference between  
> the two.