[Data-modeling] software versions/releases in the computer domain?

[Ed Laurent]

I echo Tim only because he beat me to it!

Brendan, I think you've bumped into another instance of Freebase focusing on
"current" information while ignoring everything that came before and not
documenting the currentness (it's a word, look it
up<http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/currentness>!)
of the data. While this certainly keeps the schema simple and approachable
to a wide audience, I'm not sold on it being the best default approach to
modeling over the long term.

I also think you are on a good track for modeling software releases within a
simple hierarchical framework. However, I would take a more systematic
approach to the releases (even if that requires disambiguation between the
date of release and version number). You could then treat every release the
same but co-type certain releases as a "major release" with properties that
define why it is a major release. However, distinguishing what constitutes a
"major release" could lead to a complex model that is never used unless it
is very generic or software specific (e.g., Firefox major release).

-Ed


On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Tim Kientzle <tim at metaweb.com> wrote:

> I like the idea of keeping the heirarchy here shallow and with a fixed
> number of levels:
>
> "Software Product"  -> "Major Software Release" -> "Release"
>
> Detailed modeling of major/minor/revision/bugfix is troublesome
> because there is so little consistency across products.  Open source
> packaging systems have major challenges just trying to consistently
> order versions (consider a product that switches to year-based version
> numbering then back again, so that 2.0 precedes 2006.0 precedes 5.4,
> not to mention ambiguous numbering such as "Solaris 7" which was
> really 2.7 except that the marketers decided to drop the '2'.)
>
> In fact, I'd be wary of using the words "Major" and "Minor" because
> they do carry a lot of baggage.
>
>
> On Apr 29, 2008, at 11:28 AM, brendan wrote:
>
> > hopefully your in-brain word wrap filter is in working order :(
> >
> > let me try that again:
> >
> >
> > The "Major Software Release" type could have a property "Releases"
> > with an expected type "Software Release", so every actual versioned
> > release could have a topic
> >
> > e.g.
> >                                                              ---> 1.0
> >                                     ---> Firefox 1 ---> 1.0.1
> >                                                             ---> ...
> >                                                             ---> 1.5
> > Mozilla Firefox --->
> >                                    ---> Firefox 2 ...
> >                                    ---> Firefox 3 ...
> >
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