[Larceny-users] confusing versions

[William D Clinger]

Marijn wrote:
> Is this an oversight or am I misunderstanding the versioning system?

The sequencing is ad hoc, but the basic idea is that
alpha and beta releases prior to the real v0.97 release
are qualified by an auxiliary number that increases
monotonically.  When both an alpha and a beta version
have the same auxiliary number, then the alpha version
came first.  For example, the following are in chronological
order:

    v0.97a1
    v0.97b1  (available since August 2008)
    v0.97a2
    v0.97a3
    v0.97a4
    ...
    v0.97    (does not yet exist)

The auxiliary number was bumped to v0.97a4 because we
made a simple but major change to the implementation
of millicode calls on the IA32 architecture.  In case
any problems result from that, we want to be able to
tell at a glance whether the runtime dates from before
or after that major change.

Another rule of thumb is that Larceny's main download
page doesn't offer alpha versions, but may offer a beta
version if we think the beta version is more reliable
than a previous non-beta version (as is the case with
v0.97b1).  That means our numbering system will confuse
only those who download a development version and build
it themselves from source.

Will