Comments on: The Golden Rules of Version Naming

By: gavenkoa

gavenkoa — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 13:28:44 +0000

Look to Debian and RPM policy for version comparing. Flyspray (v0.9.9.5.1) versioning schema is consistent to they!

Also look to libtool policy about bumping major version (they have special meaning about compatibility between libraries).

By: Ben Finney

Ben Finney — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 09:19:43 +0000

One way to look at this is that version strings are numbers, but not in base 10 but some arbitrarily high base; the dots aren’t decimal points, they’re to separate the “digits”, each of which is written in base 10 to keep the alphabet small. Or just say “it’s not a number” and get on with it.

Or, to be descriptive without messing around with number bases: A version string is a sequence of integers separated by periods.

By: Darren Duncan

Darren Duncan — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:06:06 +0000

@Frank - I disagree that the versioning of pgAdmin III should be tied to that of Postgres itself, at least assuming that they follow separate development tracks. Doing that tying would unduly restrict PgAdmin in using its version numbers to say things about its own rate of progress. For example, what if it reversioned to 9.0 to match Pg 9.0, and then a year later pgAdmin III has a complete rewrite for some reason. Then this major rewrite would just have a minor version update, because it can't get ahead of Pg. On the other hand, and I've seen precedents for this, I can agree with synchronizing just the major version but then letting the other version parts move independently, the major version then being a branding tie-in of sorts.

By: Version Numbering « Open Enterprise: The PostgreSQL Open Source Database Blog from EnterpriseDB

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 16:21:18 +0000

[...] to read, but I thought the most interesting was a link posted by Thom Brown to a blog post called The Golden Rules of Version Naming. If you haven’t seen it, it’s definitely worth a [...]

By: Frank

Frank — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 06:50:41 +0000

I think pgAdmin III should be in sync with PostgreSQL itself, I can't explain to anybody why 1.6 can be used for PostgreSQL 8.2 but not for version 8.4. And who could have predicted that version 1.12 is actualy for PostgreSQL 9.0? pgAdminIII and PostgreSQL are related but there versionnumbers have nothing to do with each other. This is confusing for many users.

Great article about the pain of versionnumbers...

By: Rowan

Rowan — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 16:35:47 +0000

Hi both! I think sak has hit the nail on the end with it being confusing for "the rest of us". While I accept that "pgAdmin III" may be a perfectly good name for the project, I would argue that that project should not have named its first release "1.0". I suppose the only problem with using 3.x would come when you had to decide what to call "pgAdmin III 4.0" - although presumably such a move would entail enough of a rewrite that re-branding the product as "pgAdmin IV" or just "pgAdmin" would be reasonable enough. In the end, though, I was using it mainly to highlight the potential issues to those starting a project under similar circumstances in future, so they can at least be thought through carefully and justified.

By: sak

sak — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 03:07:47 +0000

dave, that's cool, but for the rest of us (the rest of the world) is quite confusing...
moreover if you speak "pgAdmin III 2.5"...
anyways, is your project...

By: Dave Page

Dave Page — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 22:48:38 +0000

Whilst I agree almost entirely with what you've written, I just wanted to note that we consider the 'III' in pgAdmin to be part of the product name, not the version. It's baked into a number of strings and filenames etc. That are not version-related.

- Dave