Wednesday 5 September 2012

Which version of ColdFusion am I actually running? (follow-up)

G'day: this is a follow-up to yesterday's article in which I asked what was going on with CF's versioning after the recent 10.0.1 updater. The short version is that after the install ColdFusion still reports itself as 10.0, rather than 10.0.1. This is in conflict with:
  • established previous ColdFusion behaviour
  • industry-standard expectations
  • the ColdFusion team's own published material (they refer to it as 10.0.1)
  • Adobe's published Release terminology guidelines
  • common-sense


I raised this as a bug, which Rupesh promptly closed as "not a bug", with this comment:
The build number will not change after applying the update. However, you would see the update level in the "System Information page" as well as in the "Server Updates" page in the administrator. Therefore this is not a bug.
My reaction to that was asking the lines of  "[coughbullsh!t]", put more politely on the bug tracker as:


I beg to differ, Rupesh. If you're calling it "10.0.1", then it should identify itself as "10.0.1". That's how these things work.

There's been a bit more feedback there pretty-much agreeing with my sentiment.

In Adobe's defence, they did publish this blog post before all this came to my attention, in which they say this:
Does my Build number change after applying the Update?
No. It won't change. As explained above, Under System Information the Version & Build number will be shown same as the ColdFusion 10 Final released build(i.e ColdFusion 10, 282462). However, under Version field the new Update Level field shows the Update Level Number. Not changing the the Version value to 10.0.1 is a conscious decision to avoid some unwanted maintenance.
So basically they seemed to not sort the version number or due to some sort of work-avoidance. Sorry, but that's a bit weak. If one releases a point-release of some software, then the release number needs to be updated: it's part of the required work.


There's also a slight glitch in how this has all been implemented, because there's no indication in the server scope to identify this new "update level".

This release either is 10.0.1, or it isn't.  Given it seems that - by all measures of a release - it is intended to be 10.0.1, then the software needs to actually reflect that when asked.  Please reopen 3323518 and sort it out.

At the end of the day, there are bigger fish to fry than this: it's not a major issue.  However I think it's reasonable to question their approach, because their chosen approach is questionable!

Just before I finish, I'd like to gather your opinions on this.  I'm gonna try to embed a Survey Monkey survey below... I hope it works...

[I've closed the survey now, so have removed it from here. The results are here]

Right.  I'm off to fry those bigger fish...

--
Adam