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Versionitis

April 6th, 2011 by

The voting on how to do the versioning is over and the “old school” has won by 55 per cent (of 98 participants). Thanks to all that participated in the two votes and the discussion around the topic.

As Coolo said in on the project list,  we’d like to make a small change to the numbering:

We will not have a .0 release but only .1, .2, .3 release. Since we have releases in three months, the November
release is always the .1 release, the July release the .2 and the March release the .3.

So, the plan is that the next release will be called openSUSE 12.1 and launched on the 10th of November, 2011! Two years later – on the 14th of November, 2013 – we will then have the openSUSE 13.1 release.

So, the next four releases are called:

  • November 2011: openSUSE 12.1
  • July 2012: openSUSE 12.2
  • March 2013: openSUSE 12.3
  • November 2013: openSUSE 13.1

Detailed results for logged-in openSUSE members are available at the connect poll page and I have reproduced them here as well:

  • A: “old school”: Like currently but only counting the right number until 3:
    55% (54 votes)
  • B: “Fedora style”: Just integers:
    29 % (28 votes)
  • C: “Ubuntu style”: YY.MM:
    16 % (16 votes)

This is also consistent with the results of the first public voting.

Note that openSUSE does not have a major and minor numbering, even if it seems so. There is right now no difference in any way between what we would do for openSUSE 11.4 or 12.0 or 12.1 – and no sense to speak about openSUSE 11 or openSUSE 11 family. We also had in the past no process on how to name the next release (when to increase which parts of the number).

I think this new versioning is still consistent with the old one but also an improvement since it’s now clear that we change the first digit every two year. The first poll showed that half of our users prefer a date based versioning and the other a consecutive numbering. So, depending on your point of view, you can see this as a mixture of both or as consecutive numbering 😉

So, time now to make openSUSE 12.1 a great release!

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9 Responses to “Versionitis”

  1. mathw

    I must say I’m surprised. People are probably used to weird version number systems by now (they seem to be able to handle Ubuntu’s after all), but this one’s not connected to anything at all! Well, other than to history anyway. I really thought either year.number or a single number would win out.

    Still, I didn’t get to vote in the final poll, and whatever the version number is I’m sure OpenSUSE will still be awesome.

    • Alkis

      Well, that was a lesson learned for all of us who do not vote in OpenSUSE polls…

  2. Sven Rogatschew

    How about KISS? Keep it save and Simple…

    Regards

    Sven

  3. Hi,
    just for curiosity, why the next version will be 12.1 instead of 12.0 ?

    Best Regards
    hawake

  4. Ran

    What about releasing 12.1 on 11th of November, 2011 ; preferably at 11:11 ;-).

  5. Florian

    Sorry. But in my opinion this numbering scheme is stupid. It *COULD* still be cool though if you REALLY did the hybrid “versioning” of year.version combinations. This could easily be realized by using 12.1 for the March Release in 2012, so one more 11 version ahead.
    In that way the leading number would incidentally also represent the year of the release and the second number would represent the number of the release of that year. Therefore…

    12.1 – March 2012
    12.2 – July 2012
    12.3 – Novermber 2010
    13.1 – March 2013
    … and so on.

    What do you think? Would make sense I would say.

    • Florian

      Disregard above post. I messed something up there (8 month cycles actually not 4 months), therefore not appropriate.