On 05/23/2011 04:33 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
On Mon, May 23, 2011 at 12:20 PM, Ingo Molnarmingo@elte.hu wrote:
I really hope there's also a voice that tells you to wait until .42 before cutting 3.0.0! :-)
So I'm toying with 3.0 (and in that case, it really would be "3.0", not "3.0.0" - the stable team would get the third digit rather than the fourth one.
But no, it wouldn't be for 42. Despite THHGTTG, I think "40" is a fairly nice round number.
There's also the timing issue - since we no longer do version numbers based on features, but based on time, just saying "we're about to start the third decade" works as well as any other excuse.
I don't think year-based versions (like 2011.0 for the first 2011 release, or maybe 2011.5 for May 2011) are pretty, but I'll make an argument for them anyway: it makes it easier to figure out when hardware ought to be supported.
So if I buy a 2014-model laptop and the coffee-making button doesn't work, and my favorite distro is running the 2013 kernel, then I know I shouldn't expect to it to work. (Graphics drivers are probably a more realistic example.)
Also, when someone in my lab installs <insert ancient enterprise distro here> on a box that's running software I wrote that needs to support modern high-speed peripherals, then I can say "What? You seriously expect this stuff to work on Linux 2007? Let's install a slightly less stable distro from at least 2010." This sounds a lot less nerdy than "What? You seriously expect this stuff to work on Linux 2.6.27? Let's install a slightly less stable distro that uses at least 2.6.36."
--Andy