Re: gnustep release numbers

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 4 Oct 2006, at 17:23, Helge Hess wrote:

> On Oct 4, 2006, at 13:30, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> > > Still less than ideal because we have no stable version but an  
> > > improvement over the current situation which makes it hard to  
> > > distinguish dev snapshots from final releases.
> > I don't think we have a policy of making unstable releases ... so  
> > all releases are stable.
>
> As far as I'm concerned all GNUstep releases are in fact unstable  
> because they always change the ABI. But we discussed / outlined in  
> a long thread a while ago.
>
> Note: by 'unstable' I don't mean that the code itself is buggy but  
> that the ABI is unstable.

Fair enough ... that's your definition ... but it's rather an unusual  
one.

In fact not all GNUstep releases change the ABI, but the ones which  
you term 'stable' are what are generally called bugfix releases.

There are very few of those in GNUstep ... not because there are no  
bugs, but because we generally lack the manpower (volunteers with the  
inclination to do it) to make lots of bugfix releases.

However, it should be easy to tell a bugfix ('stable') release ... it  
has the same major and minor version number as a normal release, but  
an incremented subminor number.