The current system

Since the beginning of the Instantbird project, we have released versions numbered 0.x.y.z:

• 0. indicates that the initial goals of the project haven’t been reached yet.
• x is the major version number. For example, Instantbird 0.2 was a major version for which we made very significant changes.
• y is the minor version number, incremented when a release is very similar to the previous one, but with some new features. We released Instantbird 0.1.1, 0.1.2 and 0.1.3 which were minor new versions.
• z was used only for emergency bugfix releases. For example we released 0.1.2.1 a day after 0.1.2 because of a very common crash on Windows with some MSN accounts (not those we used during our testing of course). We also released Instantbird 0.1.3.1 when Instantbird 0.1.3 was no longer able to connect to the ICQ network.

This version numbering scheme made a lot of sense when the project was initially a “XUL UI for Pidgin” and the goal was to reach “feature parity” with Pidgin for Instantbird 1.0. We have, however, supported features that Pidgin doesn’t have for a long time, thus defining the completion of Instantbird 1.0 as a comparison with Pidgin doesn’t make sense any more. Actually, our roadmap has stated for a long time already that the 1.0 goal is a “Simple, usable and extensible user interface.”

In addition to the 0.x.y.z version number, we are using “aN” and “bN” suffixes for alpha and beta releases (0.3b1 for example), so the version number in itself has nothing to do with stability (actually, our testers report that even our nightly builds are stable!). 0.<something> only means that we haven’t reached our initial goals, not that the version isn’t stable.

Received feedback

While linux enthusiasts are used to have great software with a not-yet-1.0 version number, on Windows a 0.* version number was a bit misleading and we received mostly 2 kinds of feedback about the version number:

• “Wow, I can’t believe it’s so stable and featureful with such a low version number!” (user who has downloaded and tested it)
• “Oh, it looks cool, but with such a low version number, it’s a pre-alpha, it can’t be stable, I’ll give it a try when it reaches 1.0.”

Disappointing, isn’t it?

Next

We are about to release Instantbird 0.3. This is a major version of Instantbird, with more changes than any previous release. With the current changes in the Mozilla release cycle, we are very unlikely to ever release again a version containing so many changes at once (more details on how we will adapt to release much more frequently in the future in another post soon after the release). When releasing Instantbird 0.2, we hesitated between incrementing the major version number by only one (which is what we did), or skipping a few version numbers to go straight to 0.5, because we felt we were half way through on our goals of delivering a simple, easy to use, cross-platform, multi-protocol, extensible instant messaging application. After the fact, given the feedback related to the low version number that we received, we regretted that we didn’t go ahead and release it as Instantbird 0.5.

What we called Instantbird 0.3 up to now is most likely the last major release in which we change important things in every parts of the code base at once. We don’t feel that we’re only “half way through”, so this time we won’t have regrets: It’s going to be released as Instantbird 1.0. Tomorrow!