The case for version number inflation

Folks,

I'm personally fond of our version numbering scheme; without it, we'd be
on PostgreSQL version 23 now. It's old skool and like other
infrastructure projects we admire, such as Linux, Apache, and FreeBSD.

However, this weekend at SCALE I heard someone who has been using
PostgreSQL for 10 years say "we've had nine major releases".

And you're probably aware of the issue with Amazon Linux, where they
don't distinguish between version 9.1 and 9.2 and thus corrupt people's
databases.

I'm beginning to think that no matter how much *I* like our version
numbering scheme, it's hurting us with users because they see the last
three releases as "version 9". One of PostgreSQL's best features is
that we do a new major release every year, meaning that the database is
improving greatly every year. To the vast majority of the population,
our version numbering scheme doesn't tell that story.

In other words: if we have to explain our version numbering to users all
the time (and we do), then maybe we're doing it wrong.

Further, many projects which used to use "regular" version numbers --
such as Firefox -- have now embraced inflationary version numbers. So,
maybe it's time to just use the first digit. The next version would be
10.0, and the version in 2014 would be 11.0.

As a counterargument, few other open source databases use inflationary
version numbers, even the NoSQL ones.

Discuss.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com