David C. Rankin wrote:
>   With all these version numbers -- Why are the version number not 3.5.14? To me
> 14.0.0 has no meaning. I know what 3.5.14 is, why not have the full version?
> Every time I have to dig into the code, I see checks for primary versions of 3
> or 4, and then minor numbers of >= 2, etc... No where do I see primary version
> of 14. I don't know if it makes a difference, but I thought the about dialogs
> should read the actual version number (eg 3.5.14)

The version numbers from KDE are based on binary compatibility. This
means all 3.5.x versions of KDE are binary compatible and any 3.5.x
version can run applications compiled against any 3.4.x (or 3.3.x,
3.2.x, etc.) version of KDE.

However it was decided to drop the binary compatibility requirement in
Trinity in favor of ease of maintenance, thus these version numbers are
not appropriate anymore.

In the past there were critics written about Trinity, because people
were confused about binary compatibility expectations caused by Trinity
using confusing version numbers.

This is why a new version numbering system was introduced where the
major version number is increased as appropriate, signifying the fact
that Trinity does not care about binary compatibility.

In retrospect, all binary incompatible Trinity versions (with KDE 3.5
and 3.x) should have been released with different version numbers.

Even right now, the current version number of the development series is
maybe not updated enough, as there are many posts on this mailing list
which indicate that even some packagers are not aware when exactly they
have to do a full rebuild to avoid binary compatibility issues.
I'm not really sure what an appropriate solution for that would be
though. (Maybe something like 13.9.x as KDE, as KDE was calling their
prerelease 4.0 versions 3.9 as well.)

Best regards,
Julius