Change LyX release numbering to Semantic Versioning

José Abílio Matos jamatos at lyx.org
Wed Jan 13 13:55:24 UTC 2021


On Wednesday, January 13, 2021 11:51:53 AM WET Pavel Sanda wrote:
> I hope my memory serves me well, but the major reason we did not go the
> predictable route of 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9, 2.0, 2.1 etc was your own push for
> 2.0 at the Berlin meeting. I can even remember at which corner of the room
> were you standing when voicing the issue 

The meeting was on 2008 and the actual change was in 2010. So it was not at 
all an immediate effect.

> I added justification for 2.0 as a celebration of anniversary of the project
> in the release notes, but that was secondary to that push and would not
> happen without. Actually I was not even against that particular bump, but
> to use it now as an argument against predictability for yeat another
> unpredictable jump does not look fair 
> 
> Pavel

It was not my intention to picture it like that. Joel asked what was the 
reason for the change from 1.x to 2.y. At the time I said that with so many 
changes like lyx2lyx or unicode support it was more than time to change to a 
new major version.

The reason why I insist in this for so long is that the changes in lyx are not 
additive but multiplicative. All the versions since 1.2 were real major 
versions that deserve their own major version.

My concern is also related with communication.
We should really stress that any stable series is major change from previous.
And clearly since 1.2 that is true for all of them IMHO.

The time scale it is also relevant, releasing a new version every 2-3 years 
contributes to major changes between the successive versions.
If we follow Jean-Marc's analogy with LibreOffice (they are comparable to us 
in terms of solving similar problems) they have point releases but on the 
other hand they release on a periodic basis (~every 6 months).

-- 
José Abílio




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