> On Mar 13, 2024, at 11:39 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > > Jeremy Schneider <schneider@ardentperf.com> writes: >>> On 3/13/24 11:21 AM, Tom Lane wrote: >>> Agreed, we would probably add confusion not reduce it if we were to >>> change our longstanding nomenclature for this. > >> Before v10, the quarterly maintenance updates were unambiguously and >> always called patch releases > > I think that's highly revisionist history. I've always called them > minor releases, and I don't recall other people using different > terminology. I believe the leadoff text on > > https://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/ > > is much older than when we switched from two-part major version > numbers to one-part major version numbers.
Huh, that wasn’t what I expected. I only started (in depth) working with PG around 9.6 and I definitely thought of “6” as the minor version. This is an interesting mailing list thread.
That common misunderstanding was, in fact, one of the reasons to go to two-part version numbers instead of 3. Because people did not realize that the full 9.6 digit was the major version, and thus what was maintained and such.