Putting the topic into ‘Application development’ as ‘Announcements’ is a closed one.
Continuing the discussion from [release notes] Sailfish SDK 3.2 [Early Access]:
Maybe dumb question. But why do you name the SDK 3.2 whereas the next SFOS version will be 3.4?
Something that just does not get into my head.
Same as MS VS, they had the chance in (afair) 2012 to align the internal numbering with the outer naming (v12 ~ 2012) but kept going with different names…
Basically version numbers does not matter toooo much…
We could have SailfishOS version 7.2 by now if the the big bosses wanted to…
(Its why we have something named Sailfish X)
From: https://jolla.com/sailfishX/
1. Why is it called Sailfish X?
Sailfish X is Jolla’s community program where our vision is to offer Sailfish OS solution available as downloadable solution for all the fans to enjoy in their preferred device. Currently the program officially supports a number Sony Xperia product range models and Planet Computers’ popular Gemini PDA pocket computer.
Within the Sailfish X program you will always get the latest officially supported Sailfish OS version to your device, currently Sailfish 3.
But imagine a program that plays MP3 files, in software design you have to separate code (abstraction) it will become a mess if not. So you have UI (User Interface) code and code that reads the files and takes the names / artist and gives the info to the UI layer.
The code that reads the files does not need to be changed as often as the UI layer.
As time passes you name the UI version number more often and you dont touch the code that does the processing of files…
Absolutely agree.
But what irritates me always is to have these different version numbers and you need to know which SDK # to use with which UI # .
For SFOS3.3 we had the step to a higher gcc but its SDK was 3.1?
If they would have a completely different naming schema it would not be that obvious ;)i
The SDK and the OS are two products. You mentioned MS VS as a counterexample, but you should have compared its versioning to the OS versioning, not to the internal versioning of the same product. Compare MS VS versioning with MS Windows versioning. Do they match? - No. Android Studio vs Android? Xcode vs macOS?
Like the others do, also Sailfish SDK in its particular version enables development for various versions of Sailfish OS.
As a developer you should not need to worry which Sailfish SDK version to use. You should be able to always use the latest greatest SDK and only worry about choosing an appropriate Build Target (Kit in Qt Creator’s terminology) when configuring your projects.
Build targets (and emulators too) for various Sailfish OS versions can be installed either using the SDK Maintenance Tool or with the help of sfdk, the SDK CLI frontend.
Each build target supports development for the Sailfish OS version stated in its name or any later backward-compatible Sailfish OS version.
The newer build target you choose, the more (newer) features are available for development. The older build target you choose, the older is the minimum Sailfish OS versions your binary packages will support. Binary packages compliant with Jolla Harbour rules are expected to work well on Sailfish OS versions newer than the version corresponding to the build target used.