Rethink future version numbering of BE / CE?

[stefan00]

Hi folks,

I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but anyway:

It's really hard to easily distinguish between business and community edition releases. For example right now, CE is currently at 24.7x while BE is at 24.10x

This indicates to the user that BE is ahead in development and features, which is not the case.

Since BE is a toughly tested product based on a CE release, it is clear and logical that it must by nature be behind the CE release which it is based on.

I think this confuses many users, including myself sometimes. Yes, I do know about the release cycles and I read the release notes of the BE series which indicate the CE base. But not everyone does, especially not new users.

Could there be a cleaner an more intuitive way - maybe starting with the 25.x series?

best & thanks,
Stefan

PS: I personally use both. I happily pay for 2 BE subscriptions because I like the idea of supporting the project, although I sometimes even switch to CE on the BE "licensed" machines because there is a feature "I want now" :)

[franco]

> This indicates to the user that BE is ahead in development and features, which is not the case.

Fair point. And while the idea July (7) is earlier than October (10) is valid, it's also valid that the release date does only roughly correspond to the contents of the release but makes no aim to say October is any different than July, except for the fact that one is summer and one is autumn.

For that simple reason the business edition always contains this note:

> This business release is based on the OPNsense xxx community version
> with additional reliability improvements.

That's the most precise reference you can find.


Cheers,
Franco

[stefan00]

@Franco: I do know all the facts, that's why this is my idea for mid term future release cycles.

Take the forum itself: There 24.7 prod series board is now labeled 24.7, 24.10 although no 24.10. CE is not even out yet. Confiusing already, but what as soon as 24.10 CE comes out ;-)?

I guess you get my point:

For example, labeling the BE on it's actual CE BASE would be more consistent and intuitive to users.

LTE releases of software do that too, they are not ahead of something.

As said, that's just an idea and I'm sure you have more thoughts and logic behind this.

[Patrick M. Hausen]

I partly agree, because people have become acustomed to semantic versioning. Because the software industry including open source projects have trained them to.

FreeBSD 14.2 > FreeBSD 13.4

and so on.

But possibly the main obstacle is simply that e.g. 24.10 is nowhere to be found on the forum and changing the subforum title to e.g. "24.7 CE and 24.10 BE production releases" would resolve >95% of all questions related to that issue.

[franco]

> Take the forum itself: There 24.7 prod series board is now labeled 24.7, 24.10 although no 24.10. CE is not even out yet. Confiusing already, but what as soon as 24.10 CE comes out ;-)?

To be honest: people were asking for it to be labelled after years of not having labelled it. Can't appease everyone I think.

> For example, labeling the BE on it's actual CE BASE would be more consistent and intuitive to users.

I'm not sure I understand. We can't have the same numbers. We can't talk about different base products. That only leaves different major.minor, no?

The 3 month overlap is different than LTS. You are talking about the initial confusion, not eventual phase out of 24.7 when the numering is like you expect it.

I'm unsure how to fulfil that requirement without making it more confusing.


Thanks,
Franco

[stefan00]

We can't have the same numbers.

I see, this gets confusing here. I simply don't have the background to understand why you can't have the same numbers :)

Example thought with some initial release dates in mind:

Would it be a problem to release 24.7 Business Edition in October based on 24.7 Community Edition released in July?

Any drawback on this?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Would it be a problem to release 24.7 Business Edition in October based on 24.7 Community Edition released in July?

Any drawback on this?

As long as CE and BE share the same source code repo the release versions must be different.

Splitting the repo in two as if they were entirely separate products would introduce a lot of unnecessary work and room for errors.

[Patrick M. Hausen]

To be honest: people were asking for it to be labelled after years of not having labelled it. Can't appease everyone I think.

Surprised the renaming had already taken place. Good move, IMHO. Thanks.

[franco]

Didn't respond to the other topic requesting it... already lost in the unread forum messages backlog. :/

In a certain way business edition is newer than its community counterpart. It also tries to force an easy numbering on the business edition like it is on the community edition...

We could water down the release numbering in the business to look like perpetual community hotfixes... 24.7.8_123 but that is hard to communicate about too.

Using letters in the version numbers also just means some form of "debug" version or ASCII-ordering equivalent of bigger or smaller version... "24.7.c" is higher than "24.7.b", "b" means "beta" and 24.7.x.y_z is much harder to communicate from the get go.

Just a bit of perspective :)


Cheers,
Franco

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Using letters in the version numbers also just means some form of "debug" version or ASCII-ordering equivalent of bigger or smaller version... "24.7.c" is higher than "24.7.b", "b" means "beta" and 24.7.x.y_z is much harder to communicate from the get go.

Just a bit of perspective :)

Wholeheartedly agree, see:

As long as CE and BE share the same source code repo the release versions must be different.

Splitting the repo in two as if they were entirely separate products would introduce a lot of unnecessary work and room for errors.

:)

[stefan00]

So I understand this problem is technical / development related and can not be changed.

It was just an idea from a pure users perspective to eliminate those ahead numberings and not knowing which product is based on what without reading notes. Maybe one day.

Sorry for noise guys :)

[franco]

No worries.... discussing this is good. I'll think a bit more about this and discuss internally. Maybe more improvements can be made in the future.


Thanks,
Franco