Re:Firefox 71
by paulryanrogers on Tuesday December 03, 2019 @05:16PM
(#21697420)
> There is no technical reason why some releases should bump a major version number and others should not; the amount of new features or breaking changes will fluctuate from release to release
Then why have three parts to the version? You could just have the cycle version based on the schedule and a patch/fix subversion.
Re:Firefox 71
by jamienicol on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @10:15AM
(#21702825)
ESR releases get minor version bumps. Eg 68.3 got released at the same time as 71.
I don't care either way, but they'll have to switch to something else at some point, cause the numbers will look ridiculous. Firefox 157... Firefox 349... Firefox 1071
Intel's processor names already look ridiculous to me. Core i9-10980XE? Can't say that with a straight face, "normal" people seemed confused way back when Sandy Bridge got released
Considering `less` is at version 551, they still have quite some time left.
They could do like NVIDIA and switch back and forth between two, three, and four digit model numbers every decade or so as the numbering scheme gets stale. I remember having a GeForce2 MX400, then a Ti4600, then a 8600, then a GTS 250, then a GTX 460, then a GTX 970, then a Quadro P4000, and now they seem to go for a hybrid scheme where they have the two-digit "16 series" or "20 series" containing four-digit models like 2080 :p
Why is that a ridiculous name? It's from the Core X family of processors, is an i9 (which generally means more cores and cache than an i7), it's a 10th gen processor, which since 9th gen, also means that it has hyper-threading, as opposed to 9th gen and later i7s), and most importantly, as a product name is unique enough to make it easy to look up the technical specifications.
The really important decision was to switch to a rapid, time-based release cycle from a traditional long, feature-based release cycle. We wanted to reduce the amount of work that was "fixed in the next release" but not yet shipped to users; to increase our responsiveness, so that if a new feature suddenly became important, we could quickly get it into the hands of users; and to avoid developer issues like schedule chicken and rushing to get not-really-done features into a release because the next release is far away. This change was indeed inspired by Chrome, and it worked well; those goals were achieved.
Then a much less important question was how to do version numbering in a world where you're doing these frequent releases. There is no technical reason why some releases should bump a major version number and others should not; the amount of new features or breaking changes will fluctuate from release to release, but the same kinds of changes are present in every release. It is therefore simpler to just have a uniform numbering scheme so no-one has to decide whether a release should bump the major version number, and users aren't trying to understand the difference between a major version bump and a minor version bump (when there isn't really a meaningful difference).