Re: "Version" Aversion

[Marc Stiegler <marcs>]

Welcome to the Versions discussion, which we have about once every 6
months here, I think.

My most interesting encounter with this problem was in the context
of Big Configuration Management, i.e., people who try to maintain
"version control" over software systems involving millions of lines
of source code, specifically people from Teledyne Brown. They
used the terms "version" and "variation". They use the term 
"version" to refer to the sequential series of similar documents
all attempting to achieve the same purpose. They use the term 
"variation" the way you used "branch" and "prong", i.e., a spin-off.
You will find this terminology in use in the menus in the Capabilities
Review tomorrow, though there is one thing I do not like about it:
the term "version" is overloaded, in that people normally think of
versions as meaning both versions and variations. What we desperately
need is another term for sequential versions so that the term "version"
can be reserved for meaning the aggregate of both.

A year ago, when we were writing the FEBE 88.1 document, dean and I
fought over this for several hours, and in the end he persuaded me
that, at least for the FEBE document, "version" and "variation" were
not the best choice. In that document, we used "parallel version" and
"sequential version".

--marcs