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

[Faye Li]

As much as I'm aware of the sometimes subjective use of "major" and 
"minor" and a blurry line in between, I think versioning/release 
information is extremely valuable, especially once we start inputting 
more compatibility (software-software, software-hardware) data into 
Freebase. I support a hierarchy in releases because compatibility data 
demands it. So products just require Win XP, others specify required 
individual weekly Windows updates. Since both major and minor releases 
are specified in the real world, we need to support them.

Topics have aliases, so alternate release names can be entered. 
Photoshop CS3 is really Photoshop 9 (or something like that), but 
Illustrator CS3 is Illustrator 12. I think aliases are perfect for that.

-- Faye


Tim Kientzle 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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