[isabelle-dev] Isabelle release

[Gerwin Klein]

On 07/01/2011, at 3:59 AM, Makarius wrote:

> Bonne année à tous,
> 
> this is a reminder that we are approaching the next official Isabelle release. I've got myself caught into too many other tasks over Christmas vacation, and will now see how quick we can get a lift off.
> 
> If everybody else manages to wrap up until the beginning of next week, we have a good chance to release before the end of the month.

Looking forward to it :-)


> I think a release date of January 2011 still justifies to call the release "Isabelle2010".

Why would we want to, though?

Not that it's that important (which makes it all the easier to have long discussions about it ;-)), but no matter how you look at it, we're suggesting some correlation between release year and name. Then we twist it slightly to mean when we did most of the work on it or what it is most similar to if it is a minor release. I don't think the mythical "normal user" cares about that. But they do get confused by Isabelle2010 coming out in 2011 and 2009-2 coming out in 2010 etc. 

There's a fairly simple way of appearing a lot less weird to the outside world. Just take the release date and call it that. If we have more than one release per year, -n makes perfect sense, but otherwise it causes more confusion than what it carries in information for the select few who know what it means.

Cheers,
Gerwin