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Comment by nkg | Hacker News Reader

The version number going from 1.9 to 1.10 disturbed me...

This is pretty typical for most open source projects. The major version will rarely get bumped unless the devs feel that it is a significant update (or they have some predefined meaning of bumping a major version, like breaking APIs).

See for example binutils and ld (2.27)

https://www.gnu.org/software/binutils/

Or rust (which is at version 1.11) or idris (0.12)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idris_(programming_language)

I suggest you read about Semantic Versioning (http://semver.org/).

good read, indeed!

Version numbers aren't decimals. If they were, versions like "1.0.1" wouldn't make any sense.

> Version numbers aren't decimals.

Using groups of numerals separated by decimal points to communicate this not-decimal nature is, however, a potentially very confusing overloading of notation (and, actually, while most version numbers using notation that looks like that now don't have decimal number semantics, that's not historically universally true; version numbers that were -- at least to the extent of comparing as -- decimals were actually quite common in the past.)

And still are in some contexts, but that creates its own confusion. Developers reserved 2 digits for the minor revision. So what happens at 1.99 when they realize they don't want to go to 2.00 (perhaps 1.99 was a bug fix for the legacy system and 2.xx is already out there).

If you want to use a decimal-imitative notation, do like Knuth and have your system's version number converge to Pi or e or some other constant.

This always disturbs me too. I just sit down and repeat to myself a few times, "the dot is not a decimal point", and all is well. :)

Why? 1.9->2.0 would not make sense in most release schemes. Most release schemes are major.minor, so incrementing the major number implies a MAJOR change. So major that it is probably not backwards compatible with the 1.X versions.

A little off topic, but that got me thinking... Is there actually any major software that is still using decimal version numbers? So that, for example, 1.1 < 1.12 < 1.2?

Wikipedia [1] says it was common in the 1980s, but gives two only two modern examples: Opera and Movable Type. And even that seems to be outdated. Neither of them uses decimal version numbers any more. Can you think of any others?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning

For many projects, lots of consumers may not realize the project under development is using semantic versioning until they cross a decimal threshold like this and only then if they take care to notice the progression of version numbers.

I had long preferred either Real/decimal numbers as version numbers or hierarchy-of-decimal-digits (exactly one digit each, e.g. "1.9.9" must progress to something like "1.9.9.1" or "2.0.0"). But semantic versioning is really popular these days, so I'm much less surprised even if it's not my preference.

It's common for a lot of software that's been through many versions. My current os version is 10.11.6 (OS X)

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