On 2002.01.28 16:50 Dimitrie O. Paun wrote:
On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Eric Pouech wrote:
IMO, what's important behind version numbers isn't the version in itself, but rather: 1] the goal you want to reach 2] the milestones between where you stand and 1]
Indeed. But you see, for an outsider, these are all "just details". For most people, version numbers provide a sort of progress bar. (It's true, the info provided by a progress bar is mostly useless, but most people will want that instead of no feedback). It is up to Alexandre to figure out this progress bar, on whatever terms. A version number like 0.98.4 does provide a lot more "warm & fuzzy" (and a little bit more information), than a 020402 version which provides _no_ information whatsoever. In fact, just by looking at such version you can't figure: -- if the project made any progress at all -- how much progress was made (if we assume some did occur) -- the psychological gage of the maintainer on how close we are to some meaningful goal.
There is this wonderful thing called the ChangeLog. There is also the ability to view the wine-cvs mailing list archives and see what has been fixed.
I think that Wine still has a bit to go before we can even consider pre-1.0 releases. As eric said in order to do 0.99.x type releases you need goals/milestones.
I think that we should get all the technical stuff done (i.e. stabilize server protocol, overhaul USER) before 0.99.0.
When the major things have been done then I think we could safely consider wine to be beta software instead of alpha software, at which point I think an 0.99.0 branch of the CVS tree should be made and we should work towards 1.0 from there. The other option is to just leave it in the trunk of CVS-- which for our purposes may be just as well if not better since we'd probably want to concentrate development work on 1.0.
Moving to a 0.99.x version scheme while wine is still alpha is /not/ a good idea.
-Dave