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Comment by armored | Hacker News Reader

Although that's not very interesting either. Linus: "What's new?" Linus: "Nothing."

Yeah, nice. "Major version? Minor version? Revision? What're those? I like round numbers."

Why not just go to a basic increment (Linux 3, 4, 5, 6, ...), or a date-based (Linux 2011! Now with new ribbon interface!) numbering instead?

...eh. I dunno why this bothers me so much.

It shouldn't. Open source version numbers greater than 1.0 dont mean a whole lot.

Chrome, the browser, around version 8 (give or take). How much sense does that make?

Yeah, I know. At one time though, version numbering was used as a signal to other developers that relied on your software. Changing the major version number indicated a large change -- either API, or architectural, or both -- that was expected to break software that relied on it. So then, as an end-user, it was easy to keep track of which pieces were likely to be compatible with which other pieces; if your add-on or what-have-you worked with version 2.1, then it would work with 2.1.1, and probably work with 2.2, but probably not work with 3.0.

I guess people got bored with the sensibility of that, or something.

Linux has kept its main public interfaces stable for all of its several hundred post-1.0 releases, so using that scheme would mean Linux would have to use rather odd-looking version numbers like 1.632.5

Chrome is on version #11 in stable. #12 and #13 are in beta and dev respectively.

thanks!

8? I'm running Chrome 11!

You are correct. I am on 11.0.696.71.

I was wrong when I said 8.

Isn't the point of this to start correctly using the minor version numbers again, to get back to a good versioning system? And since it's a different scheme it makes a lot of sense to increment the major version to separate it.

Because the number can still mean something. Does anyone have any major arguments against or issues with semantic versioning? http://semver.org/

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