Posts Tagged ‘updates’

The Evolution of the WordPress Species, Version 2.5

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

Seems I had WordPress 2.5 final already last night, but just didn’t know it yet. It was simply masquerading as a late revision of release candidate 3. This morning when the news came through the usual update channels to my awareness, I immediately went to upgrade from the subversion repository. I found that the only file that was updated to be one wp-includes/version.php which seems to just tell WordPress what version number it is running.

Actually now that I look at it, mine now says “2.6-bleeding”. I guess that’s what comes of this whole subversion beta testing thing, not ever really getting to try the release versions for very long. Probably in essence, it is like always running a broken, un(der)tested version. It is like a fleet of horses and carriages, with the newly designed carriages up at the front. Sometimes their new fandangled modifications will result in a wheel falling off, and as such, the rest of the fleet would probably not adopt that new modification.

You can obviously draw parallels between software development and the evolutionary process, especially with open source development, with each application being a separate species that slowly adapts over time. There is no one single designer, and indeed it would be impossible virtually for any single person to design and code something so complex as the WordPress base code. But with so many contributors building upon and changing the design to better suit its environment, the species plods along on its evolving path.

The audacity to speak only in the singular when referring to any creation so complex astonishes me.