On Sunday 16 September 2012 22:07:56 Bryen M Yunashko wrote:
On Sun, 2012-09-16 at 00:25 -0500, Rajko wrote:
We should quit with minor version nonsense: "Minor number means nothing", when in the rest of the software world it means patch level. Our approach is counter intuitive, requires additional processing and it should be treated as yet another obstacle.
The reason why we re-defined our versioning was precisely because of what you said. From a marketing standpoint, we noticed a decrease in media coverage of our releases after .0's were released. People (particularly journalists) tended to perceive .1, .2, and .3 as updates to the "major release." They saw .0 as major revision and thus didn't bother to cover as much.
<snip> Yup. IF we go to a 1-year release cycle, I'm all for doing the 1 number per year thing and dump the .xyz stuff. If we keep the current schedule, we should keep the numbering - we discussed it extensively and made a vote, let's not change it every 2-3 releases.
So, I join the bandwagon to support an annual release plus a 2-year support lifecycle for each release.
Note that the 2 year support livecycle is something we'd have to put effort in: SUSE is currently paying for 18 months, the remaining 6 months would have to come from community efforts. Either in lowering the support load during the 18 months to make it reasonable for SUSE to spread out their efforts more or doing those 6 months separate. And, as Dominique notes, we do have to offer something for our users in between the releases. Respins, tumbleweed, OBS, all of those - whatever it is, we need to think about it and build it so that it's easy to use (easier than the current solutions - as in, adding the GNOME 3.6 or KDE 4.9 repo's right now is NOT easy enough). Hugs, Jos
Bryen