[PLUG] It's Springtime, so Companies are Migrating

[Paul Heinlein]

On Thu, 19 May 2005, Dean S. Messing wrote:

> Seriously, I've always found it amusing that the different Linux 
> distributions (and I guess Solaris), although on completely 
> different development paths, have pretty well tracked each other's 
> version numbers for the last 6-7 years, at least for Mandrake, RH, 
> SuSE, and Slackware.  (I have paid no attention to Debian.:-)
>
> This is, I think, more than coincidence.

I can't speak for Slackware, which used to use year numbers for 
versioning (remember Slackware '97?), but for the rest...

Red Hat's versioning dominates. All the way up to Red Hat Linux 9, Red 
Hat had a very consistent, sane policy behind its version numbers. 
Basically, a major version bump meant that a) there was a major new 
kernel version or b) a core component like gcc or glibc went through 
an upgrade that introduced binary incompatibilities.

Mandrake was originally derived from Red Hat, so it's no coincidence 
at all the its versioning has somewhat tracked along...

SuSE entered the American market when Red Hat was at (or nearly at) 
version 4.2, and SuSE arbitrarily set its version number to match Red 
Hat's. I suppose they wanted to suggest a similarity of features and 
software packages -- which wasn't entirely unreasonable, given that 
everyone was building core systems from the same source tarballs -- 
but there's no doubt the marketing folks drove that decision.

I remember a PLUG meeting in 1997 or so attended by Red Hat's Bob 
Young and a marketing guy from the (then-new, now long-gone) SuSE 
America headquarters. The SuSE guy was asked about the extremely 
coicidental version numbering. He tried to explaining by making a 
crack about 4.2 being related to Life, the Universe, and Everything -- 
which caused nothing but groaning and eye-rolling in the peanut 
gallery.

-- Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>