The Left Field

What version are you running?

There are many aspects of the IT business that have been turned upside down the internet. One concept which is effectively being meaningless is the concept of a "version" in the sense of an application software package version number/name or an operating system version number/name.

I could tell you, for example, that I am running Ubuntu 8.04 as I write this but what does that mean? After all, this machine connects to the umbilical cord to feed every day (i.e. I connect it to the internet). Once there, it goes fishing for updates to the packages I have installed. After these bouts of feeding, I end up still running Ubuntu 8.04 but it is clearly not the same operating system as it was before the update. As well as updated end-user applications, I might have new device drivers, new background processes, I might even have a brand new brain (kernel). Am I really still running Ubuntu 8.04?

Other platforms do the same sort of thing. In these days of ready connectivity, "phoning home" for updates is very commonplace. Microsoft Windows does it. Apple iPhones do it. Playstations do it...What versions of those are you running? Not a question with a simple answer is it?

Switching tack to cloud services let me ask you this. What version of Google search are you running? The question is meaningless in a very interesting way. You are running the "version" that was on one of Google's servers at the instant you asked for the page. That's it. All other versioning machinery is behind the scenes. It is not something end-users even think about.

Marketing forces still like to make use of numbers/names of course and that is fine but as the complexity of the interconnections between software pieces grows, the version number of one component out of many ceases to be very useful to the poor technologists working with them.

What if I tell you I am running Microsoft Windows XP and I have some problem printing a web page from my application? Saying I am running Microsoft Windows XP is useful but only the start of the version information relevant to fixing the problem. A possible chain of important version information in this scenario would include service pack, patch levels, browser versions, .NET run time version, JVM version, display device driver version, printer device driver version etc. etc...Pretty soon the effective version number is a thing of considerable length, complexity and unwieldiness.

There are a number of inter-related developments that are attempting to address this. At an application development level, systems like
Subversion create versions, not of individual files, but of entire repositories of files.

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