Release: xsel 1.1.0

This is a story about the meaning of "version 1.0". A few weeks ago I released version 1.0 of xsel, a simple commandline utility for manipulating the X selection and clipboard. I chose to call it 1.0 after recalling a discussion with André Pang, about how the meaning of version numbers in open source software tends to differ from that in other software communities. For example, it is often advised not to buy the first version of a proprietary software product as it is sure to be buggy and incomplete; open source projects on the other hand often aspire to 1.0 being a major milestone, bug-free and fully-functional. The Windows and Mac freeware and shareware communities tend to follow a middle ground, content to release a useful but incomplete version 1.0, but thereafter avoiding the quick version creep that afflicts companies with marketing departments (and version-limited support contracts).

I'll argue that that middle way makes for more meaningful version numbers. Putting the label "1.0" on a release should be your way of saying that it's the first version that:

• won't hose a user's system, and
• hopefully does something useful.

Any version number less than 1.0 is sending out a signal that the software isn't quite ready yet; perhaps that you could lose or damage data by using it. Many people intuitively wait for version 1.0 before trying out some software, and this is fair enough. In fact, we need a way of warning that a project isn't ready for widespread adoption, that it could damage data, that the tarball is only out there so that other people can grab the code and help fix bugs. That's what version numbers less than 1.0 mean.

After 1.0, you can keep adding features and bumping the version number, working towards version 2.0 which perhaps does useful things in a different way. And from 2.0, onwards to 3.0 and beyond; integers are cheap. The important thing is not fall into the trap of thinking of 1.0 as some kind of asymptotic upper bound representing the perfect release.

Back to xsel. At first I wrote up release notes as version 0.9.7, but then then remembered that discussion with André and realized that it should really just be 1.0. More to the point the previous release (in July 2001, which went five years without a bug report or patch) should have been 1.0. So yeah, it was a good feeling to just write "1.0" and send it out.

The morning after releasing 1.0 I got a report from someone who couldn't get it to compile -- turns out they didn't have the X11 development libraries installed, and for some reason I had commented out the checks for that in configure.ac while testing something or other a while ago. As a result, the configure script wasn't check for its only dependency. I considered doing a canonical 1.0.1 (LOL) release. Within the next day, though, I got a report about how to fix handling of COMPOUND_TEXT, an archaic way of handling international text (since superceded by UTF8_STRING). And there follows the next lesson (as berated by Raster): random bug reports stream in after a release, not before. Erik de Castro Lopo is up to his 20th pre-release of libsndfile 1.0.18; each pre-release he gets bombarded with reports.

Anyway, the post-1.0 bug reports have died down, so today I'm releasing version 1.1.0 of xsel. "This release adds basic support for COMPOUND_TEXT and fixes a configuration bug". And I'm still waiting to hear good uses of xsel --append and xsel --follow.