Tomcat 5.5 [PSARC/2008/065 FastTrack timeout 02/06/2008]

[Petr Sumbera]

Peter Tribble wrote:

>> We need to *try* to look into our crystal balls to believe if Tomcat
>> will follow a paradigm
>> of "no incomatibilities in Tomcat Minor releases).
>>
>> Also, if the community was to create a compatible 5.6 version, what
>> would we do?
> 
> As a user who has deployed essentially every version of tomcat
> that has come out, the version numbering scheme doesn't
> quite follow a major.minor approach. As I understand it, the
> major version reflects the servlet/jsp spec version; the minor
> versions are significantly different implementation tracks.
> And historically you really do care about the fact that
> 4.0 and 4.1 were different, and that 5.0 and 5.5 were
> different.
> 
> Certainly when we talk about tomcat versions in the day job,
> it's '5.5' not '5'. (We wouldn't ever want to accidentally get
> tripped up by 5.0.) So to me 'tomcat55' looks quite natural :-)

Exactly as Peter wrote. We cannot expect anything else beside 5.5 in 
version 5. And we can be quite confident with community support for this 
branch as they are still supporting 4.1 and 3.3.

 From this point of view choosing version 4.0 was rather unfortunate. 
For the same reason I would be afraid of choosing now version 6.0 (as 
it's being developed).

Petr