[Geany] version numbers - Re: Quo vadis, Geany?

[Lex Trotman]

2009/7/27 John Yeung <gallium.arsenide at gmail.com>:
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 8:04 AM, Thomas
> Martitz<thomas.martitz at student.htw-berlin.de> wrote:
>> Nick Treleaven schrieb:
>>>
>>> Well, a 1.0 release usually indicates better stability than an 0.x
>>> release.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Nick
>>
>> That's bullshit, to be honest.
>
> Well, going back to the marketing angle, I would say that there are
> still a lot of people who *perceive* a 1.0 release to have better
> stability (more suitable for production deployment, etc.) than 0.x.
> So I'm with Nick if I'm allowed to read "indicates" as "gives the
> external appearance of".
>
> Also, while I agree with some of the other comments that programmers
> are less likely to care whether a version number is below 1, I would
> guess that there are still a significant number of programmers who do.
>  I'm not saying that Geany should jump to version 1.0 to try to
> capture these programmers, just that I think these programmers exist.
>

All of the above is true and let me add my two cents worth.  When I am
trying to decide on which tool I am going to use I don't have infinite
time to download and test each one, so I look at version number as an
indication of how complete and stable the *developers* think it is. If
the developers don't think it is stable or complete I usually won't
spend time on it.  This is on the assumption that they are following
the (unwritten) normal numbering practice.

A quick very unscientific poll (at the pub) says many programmers also
use version as one of the indicators for what to try, and a version
1.x is more likely to be considered favorably.  (comment from some
that they would wait for 1.1, they must be using commercial software
;-)

So to indicate to casual/time challenged users that Geany is stable
and feature complete I would be in favor of it going to 1.0.

Cheers
Lex

BTW I found Geany because it happened to be part of a lightweight
distribution rather than actually searching for an editor so its
version number didn't matter.


> John
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