2011/5/24 Jan Engelhardt jengelh@medozas.de:
On Tuesday 2011-05-24 01:33, Linus Torvalds wrote:
Another advantage of switching numbering models (ie 3.0 instead of 2.8.x) would be that it would also make the "odd numbers are also numbers" transition much more natural.
Because of our historical even/odd model, I wouldn't do a 2.7.x - there's just too much history of 2.1, 2.3, 2.5 being development trees.
.oO(Though once 2.{7 or more, odd} trickle into the distros, it would become pretty much apparent that they are not devel.)
And then in another few years (probably before getting close to 3.40, so I'm not going to make a big deal of 3 = "third decade"), I'd just do 4.0 etc.
While 2.6 has certainly worn out, already thinking of a 4.0 is highly reminiscient of the version number arms race Firefox and ChromeBrowser are doing currently.
Because all our releases are supposed to be stable releases these days, and if we get rid of one level of numbering, I feel perfectly fine with getting rid of the even/odd history too.
If I remember past-time discussions right, ELF was the contributing factor to bump the major number to 2.0 back then; ever since 2.0, no similarly breakthrough-ing event has occurred.
What then about BKL removal? Nice place to celebrate with version jump and heaving some beers.
-Jacek