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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

The (in-progress) 4.0 changelog is at https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/ReleaseNotes/4.0

It's nice to see a software project keeping with a sane version number system (major.minor.release; major number change = architectural changes), and it's nice to see them working on fixing a pile of bugs and trying some new approaches in their architecture, instead of just introducing a meaningless UI change.

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Major version number = architectural change doesn't make a whole heap of sense from a consumer perspective.

Sure it does.

I signals major change that could cause breakage and new bugs.

That only makes sense for users who are programmers. Non-technical users have got no idea what you're talking about. All they see is the UI and the presented feature sets.

What kind of version numbering would make more sense for non-technical users?

Microsoft Office "The version to buy" edition. Followed by Microsoft Office "The version to buy, now for real, don't even think about getting anything else" edition.

Year-Index.

LibreOffice 2012-1 is the first release in 2012, 2012-2 is the second release, 2013-1 is the first in 2013, etc.

Depending on release schedule, the second number can be the month (like Ubuntu) or dropped altogether.

OK, sure. That seems smart, I hadn't thought of that. It would still be nice (for me) to know how carefully I need to read the changelog and whether it's a 30 second or half-day upgrade, but for most people, I can see how year-release would work better.

Microsoft was doing that with their consumer software for a while. The biggest issue is that people think the software is out of date as soon as the next year comes along.

With an actively developed and rapidly changing piece of free software, version 2012 actually would be outdated (and possibly insecure) by mid-2013. If the perception of outdatedness causes more users to upgrade in a timely fashion, I think it might be a good thing. Especially since you don't need to pay anybody $300+ for the new version.

Having said that, LibreOffice seriously needs a more seamless update experience for consumers. Re-downloading a 100MB installer and re-installing every time a minor update is published gets tired rather quickly.

Breakage (and bugs) for users.

  Windows 7
  Windows 8
  iPhone 3
  iPhone 3GS (minor update)
   etc.

The Apple S models generally keep the outer shell similar, but introduce completely new innards.

And notice that none of them break compatibility upon incrementing their major version number. They sure don't follow semantic versioning.

Architectural changes in a consumer product almost always bring along a new set of requirements and user-facing features: platform/OS, performance, UI design, file formats, updating policy, etc. as well as undesired bugs and regressions.

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