Duane Maxwell <dmaxwell at launchpados.com> wrote:
> Martin Brown writes about Linux:
> >     <major>.<minor>.<subminor><stage><release>
> >              ^^^^^
> >                |
> >                |
> >
> >If this number is odd, it is a developer release (unstable), and if this
> >number is even, it is a user release (stable).
> 
> 
> Seems a little "hacky" and somewhat arbitrary, don't you think?  After all,
> the <stage> (developer, alpha, beta, final) is intended to encode this
> information directly.  The odd/even thing is obscure, and I doubt many
> people on this list even knew about or even suspected such a scheme.
> 

I can't believe I'm getting sucked into this...

The even/odd scheme may be hackish and obscure, but:

	- it's simple to learn
	- it's concise
	- it's really easy to mentally figure out which of two version numbers comes first
	- no system is so obvious that you can tell just by looking
	- it's familiar to a lot of people becuase of Linux

All that together, I'd prefer to use the even/odd scheme, or something like it.  But oh well, the decision has already been made, and who really cares anyway?  The really important thing is that we have development vs. stable releases now, which is terrific.


Lex