Thursday 27 September 2012

Survey Results: How ColdFusion updaters should handle CF's version number

G'day
I ran a survey a while ago entitled "Which version of ColdFusion am I actually running?", which was in reaction to Adobe not updating the CF10 version number when ColdFusion "10.0.1" 9as they have been referring to it as) was released.  I had observed in bug 3323518 to them that they neglected to update the version number, to which Rupesh responded along the lines of "oh, we did that on purpose, so it's not a bug".  Err... no, Rupesh: just because you did something on purpose does not mean it's not a bug.  For a start, Adobe has well-documented how version numbers are supposed to be handled, and yer not doing it the way your bosses have told you too.  Secondly: to claim that something that is called "10.0.1" should actually have a version number of "10.0.0" is just daft.  Fortunately cooler heads have prevailed - Hemant (scroll down to his comment) and Rakshith's - and they've agreed that this needs fixing.


Between Rupesh's reaction and Hemant & Rakshith's clarification, I created a survey to get a feel for what other people thought about the versioning.  I only got 39 results, which is less than the minimum-50 I was hoping for, but I think that's as good as it's going to get, so here are the results.  There are no surprises:




Resoundingly people have this crazy idea that something called 10.0.1 should actually be referred to as 10.0.1 internally.  No surprise.

One person thought the current approach is correct (you're weird, mate ;-).  And a coupla people - quite rightly - wondering whether I should be spending my time on other things.  Good on them.

There were a few comments, as follows:

"Are you saying Adobe has completely forgotten about semantic versioning?"


"Most important to me personally is that Server.ColdFusion be accurate and useful. It has to be possible to tell if this update is installed."


"Shouldn't it be 10.0.1.0 (final release)....anything after that would be a further update (patches etc)"


"Common sense."


"The version number needs to be specific as to what version/update is installed. When a problem is reported, how else can we say the exact version that we are running (or the exact version that fixes the problem)?"


"None"


I particularly like the last one.  But they are of a theme.

So, yeah... lesson learned here perhaps.  I'm glad that Rakshith & Hemant are gonna get the version number sorted out in a later patch.

On to bigger and better things...

--
Adam