Future openSUSE Versioning Decided

Andreas Jaeger, openSUSE Program Manager at Novell, has announced the results of the future versioning polls. As reported earlier a discussion concerning the versioning of openSUSE releases emerged with several interesting options. A polling structure was devised and today the decision is made.

Some of the ideas were to go to a Fedora-style whole number release version such as Fedora 14 or Fedora 15. Another was Ubuntu-style in which the version number reflected the release date such as Ubuntu 11.04 to mean the Ubuntu released in April 2011. Mandriva-style was also considered that uses the year with the minor number indicating the number of release for that year such as Mandriva 2010.2 (the second release in 2010). The most interesting was dubbed "octal" which means the next release would be "o 12″ or 012.

The voting is over and it is decided that openSUSE's future versioning would remain what they are calling "old school," with a slight difference. They will continue using the sequence of version number in order of their arrival but foregoing any .0 releases. The minor number will now reflect the number of releases in that sequence. So the next version of openSUSE will be 12.1. As Jaeger explains, "We will not have a .0 release but only .1, .2, .3 release. Since we have releases in three months, the November release is always the .1 release, the July release the .2 and the March release the .3."

The top results were:

● A: "old school": Like currently but only counting the right number until 3:
55% (54 votes)

● B: "Fedora style": Just integers:
29% (28 votes)

● C: "Ubuntu style": YY.MM:
16% (16 votes)

So the next few releases will be numbered:

● November 2011: openSUSE 12.1
● July 2012: openSUSE 12.2
● March 2013: openSUSE 12.3
● November 2013: openSUSE 13.1

Jaeger also notes that there is technically no major and minor versioning. "There is right now no difference in any way between what we would do for openSUSE 11.4 or 12.0 or 12.1 - and no sense to speak about openSUSE 11 or openSUSE 11 family." He hopes the new way will offer continuity with a bit of improvement.