[Gllug] Newcomer

[Richard Cohen]

On Mon, 3 Nov 2003, Tethys wrote:

> "Martin A. Brooks" writes:
>
> >Mandrake have already released over 400mb of patches and updates for
> >their new release.  For as long as SuSe, Mandrake and Redhat play the
> >"big version number" game, they basically won't be worth using.
>
> Sigh. I can't comment about the other two, but as I've said many times
> before, RH are not, and never have been playing the big number game.
> Many years ago, they documented their version numbering strategy, and
> have stuck to it ever since. Essentially they only increment the major
> number when that release has binary incompatibilities with previous
> releases.

As opposed, say, to Slackware's strategy, which is broadly similar (the 8->9
change was due to gcc 2.x->3.x), but with a bump in the middle because Pat
got tired of explaining to people why Slackware had such a low version
number compared with Redhat.  And he apologised in public for it and
promised that it would never happen again :-)

And then there's Mandrake (and, IIRC, SuSE) which while they may all be in
the same ball-park now, didn't start at 1.  Mandrake, at least, started
somewhere around 4 or 6, because that was the version number of Redhat they
based their first release on...

> Tet

Cheers
Richard

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