[cfe-dev] What version comes after 3.9? (Was: [3.9 Release] Release plan and call for testers)

[Hans Wennborg via cfe-dev]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 4:54 PM, Hans Wennborg <hans at chromium.org> wrote:
> Breaking this out into a separate thread since it's kind of a separate
> issue, and to make sure people see it.
>
> If you have opinions on this, please chime in. I'd like to collect as
> many arguments here as possible to make a good decision. The main
> contestants are 4.0 and 3.10, and I've seen folks being equally
> surprised by both.

Thanks everyone for chiming in.

Please correct me if I misrepresent your opinion here, but I need to
try and summarize this thread for my own sanity:

The thread started out with lots of support for 3.10, the reasoning
being roughly that we shouldn't bump the major version number unless
we want to signify major change (Mehdi, Hal, Blaikie, Saleem,
Chandler, Anton, Eric, Aaron, Sean, Vikram).

Richard suggested that since we do time-based rather than
feature-based releases, the distinction between a release with or
without major changes is arbitrary, and we should move to a scheme
where we update the major version number on each release (4.0, 5.0,
etc.) with minor releases in between (4.1, 5.1, ..).

Chris advocated for "keep adding 0.1 to each major release" (in the
decimal sense), i.e. 3.9, 4.0, 4.1, etc. I haven't seen anyone else
suggest this. "I do not think it is reasonable at all to go to '3.10'
after '3.9', because we will never get to '4.0'."

Chris then expressed support for alternatively just incrementing the
major version each time, as Richard suggested, but starting at 40.

Rafael expressed support for the above, but starting at 4.0: "It is
simply not worth the time to try to figure out what is 'major' in a
project with so many different uses."

Chandler said he didn't like Chris's "keep adding 0.1 to each major
release" scheme: "we shouldn't just go from 3.9 to 4.0 because of some
decimal correspondence", and said he was open to either going to 3.10
with the current major/minor split, or if we don't want that, use
Richard's suggestion.

Michael pointed out that if we do change the numbering scheme,
changing the binary compatibility guarantee to something time-based
isn't equivalent to what we currently have.



So, it seems we're at an impasse with several folks in favour of 3.10,
Chris speaking out strongly against it, and Richard's option which has
some traction and which no one's disagreed with so far, but which
would be a bigger change.

I'll have a think about this over the weekend.

Cheers,
Hans