Proposal for changing the Milestone build names

Our system of naming the milestone builds suffers from a few disadvantages :

• When the development for release 0.6 is on-going, our milestone builds are named 0.5.01, 0.5.02 etc. This is an inherent confusion since the build versions reflect 0.5 but the release documents (functional specs, test specs, wiki pages) reflect product version 0.6.
• Due to this, there is confusion around using the version field in bugzilla to denote which product version this bug was filed in.
• The same version confusion exists around writing the test spec within Test Runner for a specific release.

My new proposal:

• When we start the development for release 0.7, we name the milestone builds 0.7.M1, 0.7.M2, etc.
• When logging bugs in bugzilla, we should use version=0.7 for bugs logged during the development of 0.7 release and target milestones would be 0.7.M1, 0,7.M2 etc
• No version conflicts between our functional specs, test specs, wiki pages and build version numbers.

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I don't really like this scheme.

It is not immediately clear from the number which release we are working towards - is it 0.7 or 0.8? Without an explanation it will always leave you guessing - and you can't have an explanation in a file name for example. We already had a confusing scheme before the current one - let's not make it confusing again.

It is not a numeric value, which may cause some problems with certain installer/packager systems.

I don't personally (I know Aparna's justification for it, I just don't agree) see any value in the version field (I think it could be removed althogether to make things simpler), this is even less appealing to me. I think everything we use the version field for is actually already present and queryable from bugzilla: the date the bug was found, the date it was fixed, the target milestone. Some examples:

• bugs that were filed during 0.6 release cycle
• bugs that are targeted to be fixed in 0.6 release cycle
• bugs that were fixed in 0.6 release cycle

I don't think there is confusion with 0.6 specs and the milestone being 0.5 < x < 0.6 - this is what I actually expect. I know from the version number and the spec number that milestones 0.4.x and 0.6.x do not apply because it is trivial mathematic properties of numbers that everyone immediately understands.

Even more strongly, I think it is actually wrong to say a bug found during 0.7 release cycle should have revision 0.7:

• if the bug is fixed before 0.7 is released, it is not in 0.7 product - the revision should state in which release the bug exists in in my opinion
• if the bug also manifests itself in prior releases, saying 0.7 is wrong - it should ideally say all the releases it appears in, but at a minimum the earliest release it appears in
• Bugzilla documentation states that "the usual practice is to select the earliest version known to have the bug" so you are using this field differently than what most bugzilla users expect - http://www.bugzilla.org/docs/tip/html/versions.html

Do you know any other project that is using it? If so, please give pointers to them.

-- HeikkiToivonen - 30 Jun 2005