Kevin's Weblog

The practice of picking version numbers without any system behind it is seriously annoying. I’m looking at a bit of code that someone stuck a version number of 0.99 into, without any particular reason as far as I can tell. I believe that this version number is typically used as a cop-out. I.e., it should be read to mean, “I think this is done, but I’m not willing to really certify it as done, nor should you really expect me to maintain it”. Personally, I think that if you don’t want to certify a bit of software, you should give it a version number like 0.1 to make it clear that it’s alpha, unstable, and probably broken. If you put in a version number like 0.99, I think you ought to have some well-defined milestone that will cause it to go 1.0. To word it a little differenctly, if you don’t know why something isn’t 1.0, then don’t call it 0.99. If the package is feature-complete and free of known bugs, then it should be 1.0. If new bugs are discovered and fixed, you move to 1.01 and so on.