Xfce 4010 - An (early) April-Fool's joke

[Stephan Arts]

Hi,

Yesterday, I posted the following blog entry on blog.xfce.org:

http://blog.xfce.org/2012/01/xfce-4010

A joke, related to the whole 4.10/4.12 vs 5.0 discussion that we had a
few weeks ago and that we re-lived on IRC due to this blogpost:

> And Xfce? I'll definitely follow that one, a beautiful simple desktop, without redundant junk.
> I am curious how they are going to fix the 'error' with the version-numbers.
> Soon, version 4.10 comes out, and we are now at 4.8.......................
> In my opinion, they should have chosen numbers like 4.02 - 4.08 in the past.....
> Despite the way numbering is chosen, i am looking forward to the successor of 4.8
>
> Source: http://ariedejonge.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/gnome-kde-xfce/
> (Since it's in Dutch, I've translated the important part)

To answer this, there is no 'error' with our version numbers. The 4
stands for the generation of Xfce, then a separating . and the
release-version (2, 4, 6, 8, 10)... since we don't count like 01, 02,
03, 04... there is no real reason to add a leading 0 to the number.
(ok, ubuntu does this, but that's their choice) - But in the end, who
cares about that anyway... they are just numbers.

But we did have a good laugh about it, and a lot of "what if's", like
'what if the version-numbers are expressed in hex? (0x4.A) or binary
(100.1010) or as a floating-point value... (4.10 could end up being
4.0999999 or 4.100001)... And eventually, the really-high numbers came
up.

It eventually led to the blog-post. We had quite a laugh on IRC,
seeing how people react on the 'news'.

To make a subtle hint that this is anything but serious, (like
multiplying a version-number by 1000 isn't enough already) I added a
fictional release-schedule to the bottom of the post. With april 1st
the date of the final-release of Xfce.

Some people noticed it (and some people didn't) and asked 'It is a
joke, right, Right, RIGHT?!!?!111' - Rest assured, it is.

It is very early for April-fool's jokes. - But I really enjoyed this
one, I hope you have too.

The next version of Xfce will carry the version-number 4.10, and we
are (as the wiki describes) discussing the roadmap and release-dates
at FOSDEM.

Regards,

Stephan

-
Oh and apologies to package maintainers and the gnome folks for
abusing them in the post ;-)