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[PoncoMacho]

Just so you know, "this Emi person" is one of the two wiki administrators; the other one is locriani (Briess), and he didn't really care what we called the new namespace.

thats nice still doesnt justify forcing a name most people disagree with merely because you can

fairly sure she didnt write all the articles herself

[Emi]

All that I've done is I entered it in the wiki config file because we needed to choose something in the interim -- I didn't expect Quietust to announce it like a proclamation.

The reasons I chose "rel4" (though perhaps a more standard nomenclature "v4", or "Release 4" would have been prudent) were the following:
-If we go by version name, we'd have to rename the namespace whenever a new version comes out. This breaks links, breaks link cache, and all sorts of annoying garbage on the server side. It's okay to do once and a while, like when we get these save incompatible versions.
-DFVD, doesn't have very clear lasting meaning.
-DF2012, better, but as we know it could end up as the namespace for a while, which frankly is fairly confusing.
-Release 4 has some meaning, maybe not immediately clear, but it doesn't have the issue of losing that meaning over time.

[PoncoMacho]

All that I've done is I entered it in the wiki config file because we needed to choose something in the interim -- I didn't expect Quietust to announce it like a proclamation.

The reasons I chose "rel4" (though perhaps a more standard nomenclature "v4", or "Release 4" would have been prudent) were the following:
-If we go by version name, we'd have to rename the namespace whenever a new version comes out. This breaks links, breaks link cache, and all sorts of annoying garbage on the server side. It's okay to do once and a while, like when we get these save incompatible versions.
-DFVD, doesn't have very clear lasting meaning.
-DF2012, better, but as we know it could end up as the namespace for a while, which frankly is fairly confusing.
-Release 4 has some meaning, maybe not immediately clear, but it doesn't have the issue of losing that meaning over time.

calling it release 4 is very misleading, as there has been far more then 4 releases.

[monk12]

Perhaps more importantly, it'd get confused with the short term development goals since their only identification is Release 1, Release 2, etc. I think I'm in favor of calling this Caravan Release 1 or some variation thereof, since that is descriptive and correctly identifies it in the broader development plan.

[Footkerchief]

"rel4" is pretty bad -- it's a term that 1) nobody has ever used, 2) doesn't make any sense, and 3) doesn't jibe with any other namespaces.  DF2010 and DF2012 aren't all that great, but they're clear.  v0.34 would work too.

Anyway, what brought me here is that I have a (very rough) string dump which I was going to add to the new namespace, but it's still locked.  The string dump is on pastebin for now.

[Emi]

Perhaps more importantly, it'd get confused with the short term development goals since their only identification is Release 1, Release 2, etc. I think I'm in favor of calling this Caravan Release 1 or some variation thereof, since that is descriptive and correctly identifies it in the broader development plan.

Mmm, quite true. The issue with Caravan Release 1 is that we're trying not to reference the version, but rather the save compatibility, since that's when we've branched the wiki in the past: 23a, 40d, 0.31, and the current version.

Now I'm thinking something like "Current 4". It's descriptive of the version -- in that it's the current version. The "4" would be slightly confusing to some people, however adding it would make sure that we can keep an alias around in the future so links to the wiki don't break (example: how DF2010 is aliased to v0.31 now, so http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:cheese still works).

"rel4" is really bad -- it doesn't make sense to choose a term that 1) nobody has ever used, 2) doesn't make any sense, and 3) doesn't jibe with any other namespaces.  DF2010 and DF2012 aren't terrible, but they're clear.  v0.34 would work too.

Anyway, what brought me here is that I have a (very rough) string dump which I was going to add to the new namespace (it's on pastebin for now).

As I've mentioned before, we can't name the current namespace by the version number, since that number is liable to change without breaking save compatibility. For Mediawiki sanity purposes, we want to keep the number of renames of a namespace down to a minimum, so we need to choose a non-version number namespace. The intention behind Rel4 (though I agree it's not the name we should go with) is that what we're really talking about in these namespaces is save compatibility, thus my "Current 4" suggestion.

[Montague]

DF2012 seems good enough and most people on the forums are already referring to the game as such.

It's a recognizable nomenclature and it follows the last naming convention. It's distinct enough and easy to use for causally referring to it.

The chances of another game save breaking release happening this year is probably pretty slim and if it does happen it'll be toward the end of the year anyways.

I don't like 'caravan' because the release had almost nothing to do with caravans and Toady likes to jump around to different development/feature tracks when working on the game. It's also a little esoteric if you haven't been closely keeping track of the releases or Toady's development arcs.

[Timst]

DF2012 is probably the simplest answer, yeah.
Alternatively, you could invent a separate notation for save compatibility, write up a page describing it, and then use this nomenclature everywhere. It's a bit of work and probably not the most user-friendly solution as it would require the adoption of the community, but it seems to be the most consistent and scalable.

[5asdffdsa5]

my idea
DFVAL

[Locriani]

obviously, this emi person, who doesnt bother to make an statement about this herself doesnt really care about popular opinion

because she obviously wrote all the articles herself and has no reason to allow debate and instead picks her own opnion that no one seems to share in liking

That's uncalled for.  Emi has spent more time working on the wiki hours wise than you probably have in browsing.  Her efforts are the only reason the wiki has run as smoothly as it has for so long.

She made a decision quickly because we had to get things moving so we could reallow editing, and we didn't get enough feedback either way to say X is right or wrong.

[Quietust]

DF2012 it is - it's not ideal, but it'll work as well as DF2010 did. Once some other maintenance is done, I'll have my bot begin importing relevant pages from v0.31: minerals, plants, and creatures should be a decent starting point, since they're pretty much all the same as they were in 0.31.25.

[Cobbler89]

Could also just go down the list of dwarven words.

This.

Don't give it a "release number" or "version number" since that conflicts with the actual version numbers and short-term release goals.

Don't give it the actual version number since we don't know how far that will change within save compatibility.

Don't give it an arc/number since Toady jumps around arcs not merely from one release to the next but in the same release ("Caravan 1" is all about evil magic? seriously? just because it happened to also include some basic steps in the economy?)!

Giving it a year/date-based name is okay, but unideal given the multi-year spans of the game.

The truest solution is giving them straight code-names: arbitrary and with next to no relationship to the progress of the game itself, the versioning or the timing.

The only flaw is that it's hard to make them convey the order. ...Unless the codenames are dwarven months! (Which works for decades till we get more than twelve save-breaking releases. Hey, it'll buy us a lot of time and be easy to consistently change if we want to later -- if we want to! Maybe we'll just pick some other order to run down after we're through months!)

In sum: Dwarven months are the ideal codename for save-breaking wiki versions.

[Buttery_Mess]

Ew. I preferred ~.34

[Mason11987]

Good to see you guys went with DF2012.  Also it looks like this transition is going much better then when we decided to do the whole versions thing on the wiki in the first place.  Glad we got this sub-forum so there could at least be some more wide-spread interest/involvement this time.

[Locriani]

In case people didn't know, Mason11987 is another one of our unsung wiki heroes who has put a lot of time into getting the wiki to where it is now. <3