From owner-freebsd-stable Tue Jan 11 6:47:53 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mail.infolibria.com (mail.infolibria.com [199.103.137.198]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1DEE51501C; Tue, 11 Jan 2000 06:47:47 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from loverso@infolibria.com) Received: from infolibria.com (border [199.103.137.193]) by mail.infolibria.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 206B9DDB82; Tue, 11 Jan 2000 09:49:54 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <387B42CA.D67EBD06@infolibria.com> Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2000 09:48:42 -0500 From: John LoVerso X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (WinNT; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: obrien@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: "freebsd-stable@FreeBSD. ORG" Subject: Re: Next release should be called 5.0 (was:4.4 BSD forever?) References: <20000110205710.D98651@relay.nuxi.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > 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