People in general crave the big numbers. It’s why Microsoft is so weird with Xbox naming. Having the Xbox 360 compete with the PlayStation 3 Vs “Xbox 2”.
Firefox also started inflating version numbers because the high version numbers Chrome was using made it look more updated.
Simple, OP and some people just don’t know what they are talking about. There was no “aesthetic reason”.
One of the big changes in GNOME 40 (that would be 3.40) was the introduction of GTK4. People used to assume that the gnome major versioning scheme was tied to GTK, so loads of people were asking the devs when GNOME 4 was coming out.
To demistify this idea of one being tied to the other they just dropped the “3.”, specially since that part wasn’t that relevant and started with the 40.
I’m partial to semver where it makes sense and date based releases where it doesn’t. At my work we use <year>.<month>.<version> like 2023.7.v2 for template releases but semver for apps with APIs and such
Gotta know, are you serious or joking here? Follow up question: are you a developer and have you ever worked on a medium+ sized project? The amount of dependencies you end up with is astounding, you can’t just “know” when all those APIs changed, that would be a full time job just to stay on top of. And that’s not even taking into consideration transitive dependencies. If a library doesn’t use semantic versioning, 99% of the time it’s correct to avoid it just to save yourself the headache.
Semantic versioning. If I have 1.0.0 and you release 1.1.0 I can be pretty confident it’s safe to update. If you release 2.0.0 I need to read the release notes and see what broke.
If I have version July2023 and you release August2023 I have no information about if it’s safe to update. That’s terrible. That’s really bad.
This is for dependency management and maybe apis more than OSs, but in general semantic versioning is a very good system. It should be used often.
X is for major overhauls. Y is for a new individual feature added or dramatically reworked, Z is for bug fixes, updates and polish.
Like Blender is currently on 3.6. They had a dramatic major program wide overhaul a few years ago. And since then have been adding new features and reworking old ones in major 3.X releases, and occasionally have smaller updates and fixes in between, giving us 3.X.Y updates.
The only thing I don’t like about that versioning system is the ambiguity that can sometimes arise due to different interpretations of what the numbers after the first dot mean.
You could either say: It’s a decimal system, therefore 3.4 is bigger (comes after) 3.13. (3.4 > 3.13) or, The numbers after each dot are independent, therefore 13 is bigger than 4, so 13 is the newer release.
It’s usually fairly obvious from changelings but every now and then I get tripped up.
I thought Linux Mint did this, but apparently they’re kinda fuzzy about it? Which was not great to learn when I went to update an old laptop, and briefly thought the project had just died.
I had to type this three times because Lemmy closes the comment box and dumps whatever you had typed, if you upvote another comment while it’s open. That’s objectively terrible.
I had to type this three times because Lemmy closes the comment box and dumps whatever you had typed, if you upvote another comment while it’s open. That’s objectively terrible.
Yikes, that is terrible. What client are you using?
I know id got on the anthology-naming thing after Quake II, but… FEAR was right there. Pick another monosyllabic name for your id-formula FPS and half the criticism would vanish.
Basically, they were doing 3.15, 3.16, etc but they decided to turn it into whole numbers. It was currently 3.19 so they decided to go from 3 to 4.0, and remove the decimal.
I was looking a Linus/Linux comment, I was trying to remember at what point Linus said “I’m incrementing the major version because these numbers are getting too big, there is no major advancement”.
Decades long projects during which time the thought on when you should change the version number and what a version number even is has changed multiple times.
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