Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 09:48:42 -0500 From: John LoVerso <loverso@infolibria.com> To: obrien@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: "freebsd-stable@FreeBSD. ORG" <freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Next release should be called 5.0 (was:4.4 BSD forever?) Message-ID: <387B42CA.D67EBD06@infolibria.com> References: <NBBBJNDFEKPEHPFCLNLHKEFKFCAA.pulsifer@mediaone.net> <Pine.BSF.4.02A.10001100926400.9534-100000@shell.uniserve.ca> <20000110205710.D98651@relay.nuxi.com>
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> And the triva question is why was there 1BSD, 2BSD, 3BSD, and then the switch > to 4.0BSD - 4.4BSD. While Jaap and Trond gave a historically correct answer, I consider this sequence among the many cases of what I call "conservation of version numbers", a principal that gets applied as a project gets more notice or usage. Basically, leading major version numbers become fixed for fear of alienating the user population. Instead, additional trailing version information is appended, leading to messy versioning and (sometimes) confusion about the "latest version". In most cases, this principal gets applied as marketing organizations get involved in the naming of releases. Consider "4.4BSD-Lite Release 2", "System Vr4.2", "X11R6.4", "OSF/1 1.3", "NT 4.0.1381 SP6", "HTTP/1.1", "JDK 1.2.2", etc. John To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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