Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

Just wondering -- why is Dolphin being versioned as 5.0-[version number] ? I just find it a little weird because there seems to have been lots of iteration to Dolphin since the release of 5.0 (five years ago now), and yet, it's still 5.0-subnumber.
This also seems to be confusing to a lot of new members who may not have realized there has been **five years** of development between 5.0 and 5.0-[version], especially when everything in the last five years is marked as "Beta" or "Development", which might scare off people from clicking on the newest version right away. (it's happened to my friends many times when they complain to me, saying "well I downloaded stable instead of beta")

The main number goes up when there's a stable release. A stable release is one without any bugs that weren't also in the previous stable release. For most people, this doesn't mean it's better as it's possible to fix hundreds of serious bugs, but add a few minor ones, and, despite being much less buggy, still not count as stable. This is the case with Dolphin (although it's thousands of fixed bugs rather than hundreds). Sometimes fixing the few regressions isn't worth doing just to make the main number go up by one. For example, it can require a feature freeze where no one adds anything new while the regressions are all being fixed and testers test that there are no unknown regressions, and that means things that might be much more impactful on users don't get done.

I agree that it isn't always worth doing, but it's been **five years** without any meaningful change to the "5.0" number. I feel it should at **least** be 5.1, considering I accidentally installed 5.0 plain earlier, and not only did my Wiimote not work, my game wouldn't run, and NetPlay was dysfunuctional. That much a change in performance should at least be put up to 5.1, even if it's not completely stable. At least just do it for the beta/dev channels, even if you're not updating stable release. 5 years of development all being under "5.0" is really, really confusing for new members.