(Top posting because my response isn't to any specific post in this thread but to the overall thread itself.) Now keep in mind that I'm putting on my marketing cap for the most part here. (You've been warned! :-) ) I sat down tonight to read through this thread in its entirety hoping to finally get a better understanding of what the versions mean to us. And in the end, after many postings, I find the answer just as elusive as when I started reading this thread.
From a marketing perspective, I'm not really expecting to see huge numbers for the upcoming 11.3 release. I'm not expecting to see huge writeups out there about 11.3. I'm not expecting to hear a lot of buzz out there about 11.3. For one simple reason. The dot three sounds simply like a minor update to the family of openSUSE 11 product line.
You and I both know that really isn't the case. Each release we put out there is an improvement, an enhancement, and yes even a patch to previous versions. There can be many new things in there, and there can be some old things that *work better* in there (we hope!). What I had hoped to see in this thread was a better understanding of what each "set of releases" means. What is the goal and purpose of each one? What does 11 and its successors (.x) mean? Is the next major version (12) truly a major version from 11? Or is it a continuation of the wonderful enhancements and additions we've made from 11.3? This is unclear to me. And its unclear to journalists too. And we have to spend extra time reaching out to journalists who gave us the pass-over thinking its not big news, and say to them... "No! 11.3 isn't just a patch update. It's really cool and new! You gotta check it out!" So, let's take a step back from talking about versioning schemes a bit and get to the real heart of the matter here. Defining clearly what each release is supposed to mean and if its a set of releases (e.g. 11.0, 11.1, 11.2, 11.3) then explain what our overall goals were for that particular line and what our new goals are for 12.0 and its successors. And by doing this, by becoming clearer what our long-term goals for a release (or release set) we can enable our community to talk about it earlier on to the world. Right now, most buzz about a release happens right around release time. But if we can generate buzz very early on, we can attract more testers, we can attract more contributors, we can attract more developers, you get the drift here. And doesn't having more testers early on in the release development mean better things for us at release time? We need to define our releases and thus our versioning schemes early-on so our discussions become more proactive than reactive. Bryen M Yunashko openSUSE Board Member openSUSE Marketing Team lead On Wed, 2010-07-07 at 00:00 +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
On Tue, 6 Jul 2010, Per Jessen wrote:
Wrt Michaels comment, I think it might be possible to define reasonable major number thresholds. We (and presumably SLE product management) would just have to accept that major releases won't happen very often.
From a SUSE Linux Enterprise perspective we are looking at major release cycles of three or more years. And, yes, product management is fine with that. ;-)
Bit of a catch-22 - we won't know what the last minor is until SLE is out, but that is already based on the last.
That is something we could untangle by providing more insights into our plans for SUSE Linux Enterprise up front. I guess this is something I'd be able to take care of.
I am in no way intimately familiar with the SLE product cycle etc., but is it important to have such a strong coupling between openSUSE and SLE?
I am quite intimately familiar with both SUSE Linux Enterprise and openSUSE and it's been nice in the past, while I do not consider it truely important going forward.
Note: none of the above is a request to keep the status quo, nor is it a request for change. In my mind this is something for openSUSE to decide independently and I will be glad to provide whatever data may be needed for that.
Gerald -- Dr. Gerald Pfeifer
Director Product Management, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, Appliances
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