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Re: Criteria for GCC 4.0
Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:
> Phil Edwards <phil@jaj.com> writes:
>
> > I'm not arguing for /never/ having a 4.0 release (although others do take
> > that position, and it's a reasonable one).
>
> If we never have a 4.0 release, then the major version number is
> redundant, and can be optimized away for space. The next version will
> then be GCC 5 (short for GCC 3.5). 5.x will be bug-fix only releases,
> and the next release with new features will be 6.
I have a theory that this happens to all version-numbering systems
given sufficient time. Solaris has been mentioned, and emacs; this
has also happened to MacOS.
It seems that what causes it is any sufficiently radical new major
version. After that, the next versions just don't seem enough to be
worth a major version number, and eventually the major version number
atrophies away. Often what has really happened is a complete rewrite
which could have caused the project to have a new name and a new
version number sequence.
For GCC, I believe this happened when it stopped being called the GNU
C Compiler, in the 3.x series.
So, I would actually approve of this change. Let's call the next
version 'GCC 5'. Bug-fixes can be 'GCC 5.1' and so on.
--
- Geoffrey Keating <geoffk@geoffk.org>