bubble bursting version numbers

Posted by crux on February 21, 2007

With all due respect,

New versioning, 0.12.2 —> 2.2.0:

is the most ridiculous version number jump i have seen i a while. Yahoo just released a new version of their Yahoo! UI Library and pull this little marketing trick.

This is even more extreme than in the good old new economy times when marketing geniuses where pushing their fail-ups towards their IPOs.

Don’t get me wrong, YUI is a fine piece of work and the yuiblog a delighting source of inspiration. But no marketing blah-blah whatsoever will make me understand the reasoning behind going from below 1.0 to 2.2 in a single step. Get real, start at 1 please.

cheers

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  1. Nate Koechley Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:27:48 UTC

    It’s not marketing, though I appreciate your conspiracy theory ;)

    We jumped the version numbers ahead for the public release because we are as committed to our public users as we are to our internal Yahoo! engineers. As you can see on many Yahoo! site, for example http://answers.yahoo.com/, we’ve been using a 2..0 track internally, while distributing a 0.9-12 track externally. Run a diff, you’ll see it’s the exact same code.

    As you can imagine, managing two naming tracks for the same lines of code is a headache, and yields no value. Therefore, as I explained in the blog post yesterday, we have finally normalized the tracks into a single unified track. (Though tempting, telling internal users to go back from 2.* to 1.* would have been tough.)

    Anyways, thanks I’m glad you like YUI, and the blog, and I hope you get used to the new numbers ;)

    Thanks, Nate

  2. crux Thu, 22 Feb 2007 09:30:22 UTC

    thank nate for commenting directly from the source. Actually it was a little marketing trick on my side, ;-) Making controversial articles postings just to attract readers to my blog. And it worked, thanks for commenting. The only problem i have with the YUI activites it the sheer overload of valuable information. Following all your output would completly keep from working on my own stuff.

    I will get used to the numbers, no doubt. They are still much better than going from JSDK 1.4 to JAVA 5. Or was from 1.3 to JAVA2? or or 1.5 to 6? Or Mustang to Orca? Hmm. Tricky business this version numbers.

    have fun

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