[gpm]Re: new release

[Paul Jarc]

Nico Schottelius <nicos-mutt@pcsystems.de> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 07:28:51PM +0100 Petr Baudis put his fingers on the keyboard an wrote:
>> And if using greek alphabet, the direction is normally
>> reversed - alpha->beta[->gamma].
>
> I re-reversed it, because I want to count-down to alpha and then
> release it. In my opinion 'alphas' are the most perfect developments,
> whereas 'betas', 'gammas' and 'deltas' need to improve.

There are some problems with that:
- It's confusing; people are already used to the opposite order and
  don't want to change.
- Counting down, regardless of whether Greek letters are used,
  requires knowledge of the future.  What happens if you have already
  released the alpha version, but then you find you need to release
  one more test version before the stable release?

If you don't want to follow the established interpretation of Greek
letters, it would be most helpful to avoid them entirely.  Maybe you
would like the scheme use by some GNU packages where 1.1 is a stable
version, 1.1.1 is a test version, 1.1.2 is the next test version, and
after all the 1.2.* versions comes 1.2, the next stable version.  This
scheme makes the order very clear, and also makes it easy to
distinguish stable versions from test versions.

Side note: will <URL:http://linux.schottelius.org/gpm/index.html> be
updated any time soon?  Or does gpm have a different home on the web?


paul