Simply version number

[1ec5]

A Mozilla Add-ons editor has suggested that we update AVIM’s major version number to match the release date. The major version number is actually supposed to match the version of avim.js the extension is based on, but avim.js hasn’t been updated since 2008, so it looks like we’re still putting out “a version from 2008”. It’s time to modernize the version number.

I’ve always wanted to simplify the version number to something more conventional, like 4.0. But the very first release of AVIM was numbered 20060713, and I’ve been afraid that changing the numbering scheme to anything strictly less than 20,060,713 would prevent Firefox from automatically updating anyone.

We need to test whether Firefox even compares the version numbers or whether it just fetches the most recently released version. If it does compare version numbers, let’s start versioning AVIM at something like r.5.26; otherwise, let’s go with 5.26.

[1ec5]

I’ve published an alpha version 0.1a that’s identical to 20080728.526b1, but so far my copy of Firefox isn’t biting.

[1ec5]

If we were to assign conventional version numbers to each of the builds, based on the amount of rearchitecting or new features, I think we’d arrive at 5.1 for the current release and 5.2 for the version still in beta:

• 20060714 → 1.0
• 20061001 → 1.1
• 20080224.59 → 2.0
• 20080224.87 → 2.1
• 20080224.110 → 2.2
• 20080224.118 → 2.3
• 20080224.139 → 2.4
• 20080728.177 → 2.5
• 20080728.195 → 2.6
• 20080728.210 → 2.7
• 20080728.237 → 2.8
• 20080728.250 → 3.0
• 20080728.280 → 3.1
• 20080728.306 → 3.2
• 20080728.325 → 3.3
• 20080728.366 → 3.4
• 20080728.450 → 4.0
• 20080728.524 → 5.0
• 20080728.525 → 5.1

[1ec5]

After almost a day, Firefox still isn’t seeing the update, so let’s go with r.5.3. (r.5.2 would be confusing because it looks less than 526, the current build number.)

[1ec5]

Not so fast. nsIVersionComparator says “r.” still sorts before “20060713”. In fact, the only way to simply this version is to use “*.” as a prefix, as strange as that looks. That’s just what we’ll do.