[josm-dev] Introduce versioning scheme

Dirk Stöcker openstreetmap at dstoecker.de
Tue Feb 9 07:27:43 GMT 2010


On Mon, 8 Feb 2010, Sebastian Klein wrote:

> 0.16.3-r2561

Actually we have a version. It is 1.5. So full release is "JOSM 
1.5-2957. That's why the User-Agent of JOSM is "JOSM/1.5 (2957 de)" (and 
no, it is not the Java version, it is really the JOSM version, look into 
download archive).

Now the question is, why don't we increment it?

Well, the answer is easy. Whatever number it is, the majority of users 
actually don't care as long as it follows the rule that higher numbers are 
more recent.

Due to our nightly builds we have a always working recent version and 
the tested is only a specially marked version. We don't give long-term 
support for releases or handle them in a special way (except saying that 
it is more stable than the usual latest).

I would agree that handling release numbers would be useful when we really 
had supported releases. But currently we don't have and at the moment even 
the latest versions are usually stable enough, so we need no special 
release handling. We have a working update information system, so the 
exact number does not really count a lot.

That JOSM moved away from the individual version based approach to a SVN 
release number (before I got involved at all) shows that this approach has 
certain advantages.

Maybe in future another release scheme is required again, but at the 
moment it is not yet time for it.

> Interesting, there has been a release in each month.

Well, actually this is by design. The idea is to have 2 weeks 
active development and 2 weeks fixing. Doesn't work always :-)

Ciao
-- 
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