Thanks, Andrew, a reasonable reason. Time flies and GCC or its predecessor has been around for about 25 years. In another 25, hopefully GCC will still be a leading compiler and the larger numbers won't seem awkward.
Regarding what's a small vs large change, I'd say that building with C++ and newly generated C++ library was worthy of a major version bump, but that's just my amateur opinion. John pins...@gmail.com wrote: > > > >> On Jun 22, 2015, at 6:55 AM, JohnT <democrit...@att.net> wrote: >> >> I am wondering why it appears that GCC has started drastically raising its >> major version number for minor changes, instead of spending several years >> on version 3 and 4. 4.0.1, 4.1.1 and 4.12, 4.2.3, 4.3.2, 4.4.5, up through >> 4.7.0, 4.7.1, 4.7.2, the 4.8 and 4.9 releases, then version 5.1 and >> talking about version 6. Little changes should be reflected in minor >> version and bugfix numbers, not major version jumps. > The simple answer is there is no justification to ever bump the major version > any time soon so why not make the major version the one which gets bumped > each year. So 5 is the version which is released this year, 6 next year, etc. > this is no different from 4.9 last year and 4.8 the year before really. Just > it was decided 4.10 does not make sense and is partly confusing to some > users; does it come before or after 4.2. Anyways the decision was done to get > rid of that confusion and also to avoid having to make a justification of > when to bump the major version number. >
