XH Versioning

[cmb]

Hello Community,

when I consider our latest releases, certainly 1.6 should have been 2.0.0 (we worked more that a year on the 94 roadmap items, and caused a few incompatibilities with existing plugins). 1.6.1 should have been 2.0.1 (some bug fixes only); 1.6.2 -> 2.1.0 (several new config options); 1.6.3 -> 2.2.0 (emergency template, XH_wantsPluginAdministration()); 1.6.4 -> 2.2.1 (two bug fixes); 1.6.5 -> 2.3.0 (set mail subject from URL, folder_* config options hidden). In this sense 1.7 would become 2.0.0 (and 2.0 would become 3.0.0).

Besides the numbers, not much would change:

• the voting might be skipped for patches
• users don't need to do a migration for updating minor versions, but only for major ones
• we adhere better to common semantic versioning

Thoughts?

[svasti]

We are not the only ones ... I am just trying to update modified ecommerce 1.0.5 to 1.0 6. Ha, ha, that's a major update with changes to the databank-organisation, templates are not compatible any more, etc. etc.

Our updating scheme is a bit conservative, but this doesn't scare users. The mysterious future version 2.0 which is supposed to introduce so many changes that you won't recognize CMSimple any more, has been mentioned time and again. Looks like going to be difficult to update an existing site.
Version 1.6 sounded much more friendly.
I think our numbering is all right.

[Bob]

Hi guys
IMHO, there are two manners to think of the versioning. Either the purpose is to make think that the previous version is obsolete and to urge to evolve (commercial vision), or the purpose is to reassure the user by simply showing that the product is regularly and gradually updated (free vision).
However it seems reasonable not to go away too much from standards in versioning, the branch 1.6 is maybe "slightly too shy"!
And although congratulations to the developers you are!

[cmb]

We are not the only ones ... I am just trying to update modified ecommerce 1.0.5 to 1.0 6. Ha, ha, that's a major update with changes to the databank-organisation, templates are not compatible any more, etc. etc.

We don't have follow bad examples, though.

The mysterious future version 2.0 which is supposed to introduce so many changes that you won't recognize CMSimple any more, has been mentioned time and again. Looks like going to be difficult to update an existing site.

AFAIK 2.0 has been a vague idea shortly after XH 1.0 had been published -- there have been several ideas around (and there's even a v2_development branch in the repo), but that's water under the bridge now. Currently, there's not much on the roadmap for 2.0, so who knows what 2.0 will be? Anyhow, 1.6 required already a migration (not an easy update), and 1.7 is likely to need a migration as well. As I said: not much would change for users if we change the versioning.

IMHO, there are two manners to think of the versioning. Either the purpose is to make think that the previous version is obsolete and to urge to evolve (commercial vision), or the purpose is to reassure the user by simply showing that the product is regularly and gradually updated (free vision).

I wouldn't strictly separate these manners. I don't want to go commercial with CMSimple_XH (we can't sensibly do that anyway), but XH 1.5 had reached its end of life more than six months ago, so all users should ideally have already upgraded to XH 1.6.x by now, because there are no bug fixes and security patches for XH < 1.6 anymore, even though there are know vulnerabilities in these versions. This is not to annoy users, but rather a concession to our limited development resources -- backporting bug fixes is sometimes very time consuming and error prone.

However it seems reasonable not to go away too much from standards in versioning, the branch 1.6 is maybe "slightly too shy"!

Well said.