[m-dev.] release version numbers

[Paul Bone]

On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 11:00:50AM +1100, Ian MacLarty wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Julien and I were discussing removing the "0." from the release
> versions, so the next release would be 14 instead of 0.14.  From MC's
> point of view it'd help when trying to sell software written in
> Mercury, as the 0. versions make it seem like Mercury is "not quite
> ready", which in reality is not the case.
> 
> How does the rest of the team feel about this proposal?

14 implies that we've had 14 major changes to the system.  It doesn't sit right
with me.

1.0 or similar might be better, but then people will want to know _why_ we've
decided to move to 1.0 from 0.13.1  From the outside our decision to move to
1.0 will look arbitrary.

Naming releases after a year and possibly month might be more appropriate, it
seems to work for the Ubuntu project sans the silly animal names.  (How many
isotopes of Mercury are there? (joking)).  I like this scheme since it reflects
our intentions of making one release roughly every six months.

Using a major version number doesn't reflect our intentions since we don't plan
to have features completed by particular versions, what we release is more of a
snapshot of several works in progress. 

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