Re: I had a dream

[Mark Galassi <rosalia at lanl dot gov>]

    >> What about a 0.5.1 instead of a 0.5+ ?

    Gerard> Indeed. What the hell is 0.5+ supposed to mean anyway?
    Gerard> Computing on planet Earth is already too confusing; can we
    Gerard> stick to a standard convention for the version numbers
    Gerard> please?

As Brian pointed out, the + is because it is not a release.

I discussed the issue on the GNU maintainer list before I chose this
convention, and found out that there is no convention in place for
anonymous CVS checkouts, which are a rather new phenomenon.

Since many projects have the problem that people report bugs against
anonymous CVS checkouts reporting the version number in configure.in,
maintainers were going crazy trying to figure out what precise
configuration the guywas using.  So they came up with rather bogus
approaches, like ignoring mention of odd-numbered patch levels (like
0.5.1 or 0.5c).  I have proposed the + as a standard way of denoting
non-release CVS versions after the 0.5 release.