[Rd] Version names

[Peter Dalgaard]

Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at myway.com> writes:

> : >	rw2010a - alpha, i.e. development version (previously rw2010dev)
> : >	rw2010b - beta version (previously rw2001beta)
> : >	rw2010f - final version (previously rw2010)
> : >	rw2010p - patched version (previously rw2010pat)
> : 
> : That would work.  Use the rename command, and you've got it.
> : 
> 
> Renaming is not really workable if you are giving your scripts to others.
> They won't want build scripts that rename their folders.  
......
> Its really desirable to keep Windows batch scripts as simple as 
> possible and such a transformation is trickier than you might
> think in the Windows batch language. 
> 
> I was hoping that the R team would consider a simplifying
> change to make it easier to create build scripts.  The least such 
> change that I can think of is to use alpha as a suffix in place of dev 
> and to use final to suffix unsuffixed versions.  That would be enough to 
> allow them to sort in ascending order.
> 
> This involves no coding at all for the R team.  Just a decision
> to regularize the naming.

In a word, no, we won't do that. I'd certainly veto it if it came to
that. 

It is a bad idea to have scripts depending on sort order (and R core
has learned the hard way that sort order depends on locale), and it is
an even worse idea to modify development concepts to fit a specificic
alphabetical order. Case in point: A development version is _not_ the
same as an alpha version!

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907