Comment 1 for bug 1475568

Thanks for this suggestion.

Ubuntu has never been competent at giving software version numbers: the Year.Month scheme is routinely misunderstood <https://goo.gl/IVxKuA>, LTS vs. non-LTS versions are similarly confusing, and hundreds of Ubuntu packages are simultaneously incomplete enough to have pre-1.0 version numbers but somehow complete enough to ship by default (dpkg -l | grep " 0.").

Unfortunately Ubuntu Touch makes this even worse, with at least seven different data used for identifying an OS version. I'm currently trying to distill these into a single brief string, that we can display on the "About This Phone" screen, that tells you most of what you need to know to understand things like whether a particular bug is fixed on your phone. <https://lists.launchpad.net/ubuntu-phone/msg13955.html>

One thing I won't do, though, is add the OTA number as an eighth datum. Not just because adding an eighth thing would be making the problem worse rather than better. But also because numbering OTA updates is meaningless. It made sense while there was only one Ubuntu Touch device widely available, but that is no longer the case. It is nonsense to describe, for example, an update as "OTA-5" when it is, in fact, only the first OTA update ever for the Meizu MX4. "Update" and "version" are words with different meanings.

This is similar to the period before the first Ubuntu phone was released, where engineers commonly referred to a particular version as "Ubuntu RTM". <https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-rtm> RTM for what, exactly? Only for the BQ Aquaris E4.5. That's silly in retrospect, because we've had and will have RTM for multiple other devices.

If you see any engineer in future refer to an Ubuntu version using an OTA number, please mock them gently.