Re: The case for version number inflation

Josh,

* Josh Berkus (josh@agliodbs.com) wrote:
> And you're probably aware of the issue with Amazon Linux, where they
> don't distinguish between version 9.1 and 9.2 and thus corrupt people's
> databases.

That's really, really sad to hear, but I don't think a different way of
versioning would have helped.  If people provide packages without
reading any documentation or understanding what they're packaging,
they're going to make mistakes like this.

> In other words: if we have to explain our version numbering to users all
> the time (and we do), then maybe we're doing it wrong.

I don't think switching to inflationary version numbers would change
what we need to tell users at all- in fact, it might even make things
worse.  How many people worry about upgrading from firefox 19 to 20?

> Further, many projects which used to use "regular" version numbers --
> such as Firefox -- have now embraced inflationary version numbers.  So,
> maybe it's time to just use the first digit.  The next version would be
> 10.0, and the version in 2014 would be 11.0.

That would reduce our ability to distinguish, for our users, truely
major changes to the database code base from more natural progressions.
IOW, as in the past, I expect '10.0' to be "wow, we really changed a
huge amount of stuff, consider this one carefully" while 9.3, 9.4, etc,
are a bit less so.  There's also the consideration about how we might
identify to users which releases can be upgraded with pg_upgrade vs.
those which can't (should that ever happen again..).

Lastly, to put it a bit more explicitly, I feel that it's valuable to
have version numbers which are meaningful and I think that many of ours
users do too.

    Thanks,

        Stephen