Xfce 4010 – (release-schedule and versioning)

• January 17, 2012
• Stephan Arts

Hi all,

There has been a lengthy discussion about the xfce version-number.
Is it OK to call the next version of xfce 4.10?

Some package maintainers have a problem with 4.10 being a later version then 4.8, since they see 4.10 as 4.1 with an extra decimal for precision.

Since it could cause upgrade-problems for several distributions, we should find a way to solve that problem.

Why not go for 5.0?

If the ‘.’ is a decimal-separator, a 0.2 upgrade from 4.8 would end up at Xfce 5.0. But we already discussed that . We are not going for 5.0, it would only create confusion, and people start thinking we pulled a ‘gnome-3’ on them. So that one was out pretty quick.

But, the confusion remains. Olivier Fourdan argued that we could think of it as a hexadecimal value, so 0x4.8 would be followed by 0x4.A. Though this sounds funny, and it solves our problem for a few versions (0x4.C, 0x4.E) but we’d end up with 0x5.0 eventually… resulting in the same problem.

And nobody uses the hexadecimal system for version-numbers, that is silly.

So? Now what?

It took a while before we realized, that the ‘.’ could be seen as a separator for thousands (it’s used like this in most of Europe). So you’d have Xfce 4,008 and Xfce 4,010. This not only solves our problem for the next version. At the rate of one release every 2 years we stay away from the whole 5.0 discussion for another 990 years. (Unless another reason appears to introduce a 41xx series of 50xx series of Xfce somewhere this century).

So, here’s the conclusion:
The next version of Xfce will be Xfce 4010 (four-thousand-and-ten)!

But that’s ridiculous!?

Well, it used to be. But these days anything is possible with version-numbers really, except for going backwards.

Which is precisely what we are avoiding here.

Just look at Mozilla Firefox (moving from 4 to 9 at the same pace as they went from 0.7 to 1.0) or Google chrome (what version-number are they using anyway?), or the linux-kernel, going from 2.6.0 to 2.6.39 with entire subsystems being rewritten from scratch, and then moving from 2.6.39 to 3.0 without any radical change whatsoever.

Really, moving from 4.8 to 4010 is not really that big a deal, if it serves the right purpose.

That’s nice and all, but when will we get it?

Ah, more good good news :)

We have a new schedule. (it is not published to the wiki yet though)

Essentially, the development-phase is pro-longed until the weekend after FOSDEM, giving us time to do some hacking there and get it in master the week after.

We hope you are as happy as we are with the new release schedule.

Update: There was some confusion about the date notation, updated it to get rid of the month-numbers.

Update-2 [18-01-2012 13:37 CET]: For more background information about this decision, check this link