From: James Britt <jamesUNDERBARb@...>
Date: 2004-07-11T23:51:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Business application building with Ruby

Kirk Haines wrote:

> On Sun, 11 Jul 2004 21:07:33 +0900, Alexey Verkhovsky wrote
> 
>>Thanks for the responses.
>>
>>What should I make of the somewhat scary fact that most of the
>>components mentioned, including ALL persistence layer stuff, have
>>version numbers 0.something?
> 
> 
> In my case, with Kansas, it's because there are some features that I would 
> still like to put into the library before I get to a 1.0, and because my 
> documentation is poor.  The 0.x versioning is more of a counter than 
> anything, right now.
> 
> Ditto with Iowa.  I've been using it for production software for two years.  
> But there are still a couple things I want to add.  I probably should just 
> cut to the chase and get a version 1.0 released, really.


Similar case with Blogtari.  It runs rubyxml.com and ruby-doc.org, plus 
some number of other sites.  There are still some issues, and some 
features I want to add, and some of the API may change, but it's 
basically stable.

The use of version number < 1 often means that some features are yet to 
be added, the API may change, or there are bugs to be worked out.

Code also often reaches the 1.0 state when the owner realizes he or she 
just doesn't have any more time to work on it, and simply wants to stamp 
it as "done."

For most libraries you really need to read the release notes to see what 
it does, and if it does it reliably.  v0.x may mean "it doesn't do all 
it should, but what it does do it does well."

James