Succeeding GNOME 3.38 Will Be "GNOME 40" - Yes, GNOME Forty

[stargeizer]

What technical reason? Please just don't tell about "some software that checked Windows number and though they are running on Windows 9x" because it was never confirmed officially and looks like myth. Most likely that was marketing reason - 10 looks better for "last Windows" than 9.

Nope, it was mostly technical, and it was due to installers and driver configurators in the past have been coded with crazy checks that made the microsoft compatibility testers go cry. The M$ compatibility group coders and testers had to deal with a huge load of bullshit back then to ensure backwards compatibility, according to an old colleague that around 8-10 years ago worked in M$.

Nowadays it appear as something ridiculous, but then again, it is a sign of the times.... remember the old times when people needed a punch card to use a computer??.... Probably in 20-30 years more people will wonder why humanity was so stoopid to use "C" or "Rust" when "Valgatron 2050" will be posed as the new popular language....

[ix900]

What's in a version number? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Gnome would, were it not Gnome call'd,
Retain that dear perfection which it owes
Without that version.

What do you call a rose on a summers day? lol.

No no no... you are all wrong, this is part of GNOME's direct work with Microsoft to port GNOME to WSL2! Next version will be GNOME 360, followed by GNOME 1 to help all Windows users understand each GNOME generation.

No one understands how numbers work. Its 1 2 3 40.

[Klassic Six]

He's a yes man with no critical mind of any kind, as most (not all) vanilla Gnome users. What did you expect.

So having critical mind means using GNOME with some broken extensions preinstalled, right.

[starshipeleven]

When Windows jumped from 8 to 10, as dumb as the reason was, at least there was a technical reason for them not to use 9.

It was not dumb at all. A lot of software is written like absolute shit and many admins are grateful for not using 9 as version number

[starshipeleven]

It is offensive.

What are pipes used for? Smoking drugs.

What does the pipe symbol look like? Trump's Border Wall ||||||||

Trump's border wall is more like I // __ __ ///// right now after some strong winds, an you really need to not post while high

[leipero]

How is this less unwieldy when accounting for GNOME 4.0's release, or, the simple fact that it's making some dramatic leap of a number with no particular rhyme or reason? I imagine this is going to cause a mess for package managers checking compatibility, especially once GNOME 4.0 comes out, and makes discussion of GNOME 3.x/40.x more confusing and tedious.
Also, what exactly is so "unwieldy" about 3.39, or 3.40? It's the same amount of characters as 40.0, except it's not ambiguous about what's coming up next. The whole point of assigning a version number to a product is so you understand clearly where something stands in the timeline of development.

But that's the thing - there will be no GNOME 4.0, they want to move away from toolkit based versioning, and it makes sense.

As far as I understand, there will be no "massive ground up changes" to justify main versioning bump while attempting to decouple versioning from toolkit versioning, but that leaves an issue of GNOME 3.xx.x staying at version 3 for, well..., forever, so the most logical solution is to move the versioning method towards something else that would not seem so "stagnant".

IMO, all of this boils down to the fact that GTK (or any toolkit for that matter) does not bring "massive change" in comparison to the toolkits of the past, generally, you can do almost anything with current toolkits, so they become less relevant. Also, slower development pace of toolkits (in general) is kinda limiting towards DE versioning if coupled together, hence why GNOME is at version 3 for ages now. That by itself isn't an issue from technical perspective (at least, not a big issue), while from marketing perspective, it is - why? Because it artificially shows "lack of progress" of the DE, say GNOME 3.12 vs 3.38 = massive difference, but looking by numbers only, one can draw wrong conclusion that they are "just a few versions apart".

PS: I don't think the versioning choice is the most fortunate one..., but I am not sure what would work better anyway,

[schmidtbag]

But that's the thing - there will be no GNOME 4.0, they want to move away from toolkit based versioning, and it makes sense.

Huh?
From the article:
"The developers decided to change the versioning scheme due to the GNOME 3.xx minor version "getting undwieldy", not going to GNOME 4.0 to avoid confusion with the imminent GTK 4.0 release, and other reasons."
And from the source:
"A: With GTK 4.0 being released during the next development cycle, calling the next version of GNOME “4.0” would have unfortunate/unintended implications about the platform, especially from an engagement and marketing perspective. "

[bdog]

I love big version numbers!

[ssokolow]

What technical reason? Please just don't tell about "some software that checked Windows number and though they are running on Windows 9x" because it was never confirmed officially and looks like myth. Most likely that was marketing reason - 10 looks better for "last Windows" than 9.

About GNOME - well, I don't like this. I miss times when my browser version was 3.6.28 not 80. major.minor.patch versioning is simple and readable. What version will major release of GNOME get? It will cause confusion and it will be hard to see difference between GNOME 3 and future GNOME 4 in versioning.

Read some of the anecdotes on The Old New Thing. The lengths Microsoft goes to in the name of backwards compatibility are insane.

[angrypie]

Why not use year.month like Ubuntu has done for years? "40" alone sounds nonsensical. Mesa-style version numbering (year.release.patchlevel) would also work.