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by James Robertson.
Original Post: What's the Point Zero for Anyway?
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I'll take it a bit further. Why put the .0 there anyway? It's a waste. Just release with version 0. And then 1. And then 2. If and when you branch, use a some sort of suffix to split it free. What is with the .0 though? How often is it really worth while? The supposition seems to be an attempt to communicate "this is the real thing". But everyone knows from experience, that a .0 release rarely lives up to it's author's expectation. It is a later point release that becomes everybody's favorite.
Left with this ambiguity, no ignorant person can look at your personalized/customized value judgements about when to increment what part of the version, and discern whatever it is you had in mind. The only real value is that a) this version is later or earlier than that other version, b) an urban concensus has congealed around known good releases ("ah, it's the 3.14.59 version that you wanted, *that's the good one!!")
My theory on this silliness is that it's what our tools teach us to do. It's all in whatever template your versioning system tends to proffer as the default version. A long time ago, certain case/source code tools liked to default to w.x.y.z value. So out came 1.0.0.0, and then 1.0.0.1, followed by 1.0.0.2. This was patently and obviously preposterous, so that faded quick, and we moved into the realm of just X.Y.Z. The religion of the "major-minor-maintenance". A lot of stuff is still there. But I've noticed more people are in the A.B versions now. In the VW Store system, this is the default. I hope we move beyond this soon too. Automated build systems' inability to deduce what is major and what is minor leave me to hope we'll get there yet.
For years, I watched NT 4.0a boot. I knew the 4.0a thing was a total marketting moniker. What really mattered was that it said "build 1381".
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