Is 3.0 worth breaking backward compatibility?

[Lie Ryan]

On Tue, 09 Dec 2008 17:25:59 -0500, Benjamin Kaplan wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 3:56 PM, Lie Ryan <lie.1296 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Sun, 07 Dec 2008 21:48:46 +0000, Tim Rowe wrote:
>>
<snip>
>> >
>> > But that's what a major release number does for you. Modula2 was
>> > quite a break from Modula. Think of Python3.0 it as a new language,
>> > if you like, that's inspired by Python2. You can stay with Python2 or
>> > you can adopt the new language. That way you won't have to think of
>> > it in terms of breaking any sort of backwards compatibility because
>> > there is no backwards ;-)
>> >
>> > --
>> > Tim Rowe
>>
>> Actually I noticed a tendency from open-source projects to have slow
>> increment of version number, while proprietary projects usually have
>> big version numbers.
>>
>> Linux 2.x: 1991 Python 3.x.x: 1991. Apache 2.0: 1995. OpenOffice.org
>> 3.0: acquired by Sun at 1999. GIMP 2.x: 1995. Wine 1.x: 1993.
>>
>>
> Wine actually timed the 1.0 release to be at about t the 15th "birthday"
> of the project.

15 years is a very long time to get to version 1.0, many other (usually 
commercial or commercial-oriented front of a software) software release 
version 1.0 after 2-3 years of development, often shorter. wine has been 
used by a lot of people, not only a few internal developers and beta 
testers.

> 
>> Compare with
>> Windows: NT 3.1-NT 6.x: 1993. Visual Studio 97, 6.0, .NET, .NET 2003,
>> .NET 2005, 2008: 1997. Photoshop (11 versions to CS4): 1987. Microsoft
>> Office 3, 4, 95, 97, 2000, XP, 2003, 2007: 1990. Flash MX, 9, CS 1-4.
>> iTunes 8: 2001. RealPlayer 4-11: 1995. Macintosh 1.0-9: 1984-2001, X.5:
>> 2001. Winzip 12.0: early 1990s.
>>
>>
> Just to note: Office 2007 is also known as Office 12, if you want to
> look at version numbers. Also, Mac OS hasn't increased the major version
> number past 10 since they switched from their own proprietary kernel to
> using the open-source Darwin.
> 
> 
> 
>> Interestingly, many linux _distro_ also inhibit this quick version
>> number change. Fedora 10, Ubuntu is 2 years old, version 8 (they start
>> from version 6 not 1).
>>
>>
> That's because 8 isn't the verison number- it's the year the version was
> released (8.10 is October 2008, not the 10th update to version 8).

I know about that, but in my definition (and Wikipedia's), it is still 
the version number (maybe I forget to put a footnote). My point is that 
commercial software and commercial front of a free software (linux 
distros, Cedega 6.1) prefers having big version numbers.

<snip>