Date:         Thu, 13 May 1999 14:30:42 -0500
Reply-To:     Michael S Hines <mshines@PURDUE.EDU>
Sender:       "SAS(r) Discussion" <SAS-L@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU>
From:         Michael S Hines <mshines@PURDUE.EDU>
Subject:      SAS Versions of the future
In-Reply-To:  <85A8CA546CA1D111A56040003101F2920523732D@gpnt12.geico.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

This is not a lot different that what happens now... if you check the SAS
Site (http://www.sas.com/service/techsup/maint.html) you will find what are
called maintenance level TSxxx fixes - these are not a lot different that
what Microsoft calls SPx and HotFixes.  Not that everyone keeps their SAS
install up to date with patches - but perhaps they should (at least from a
technical support point of view).  There are reasons not to be on the
bleeding edge of installing patches too... some break some things when they
fix others.  More than one patch has been pulled back at another vendor's
site (MS Office 97 SP-2, MS WinNT SP4 for example).
 
As with most major software vendors who do continuous maintenance and
listen to their users - there will be continual maintenance - both for your
work in different computing environments, and for other systems that your
product(s) rely upon - be it OS's or applications - via programmatic
interfaces (OLE, DDE, ODBC, COM, DCOM, CORBA[??]) or data interfaces (PROC
ACCESS, DBF, etc.).
 
This is a shift in thinking at SAS, but conforms to the general industry
practice of releaseing major number products when there are significant
differences in the product (usually new features), and using minor numbers
to indicate maintenance patch levels within that product release.
 
Sometimes the numbering scheme goes crazy such as from 3.0 to 3.1 to 3.11
to 95 to 98 (Win16/32); 3.51 to 4 to (almost) 5 to 2000 (WinNT); 2 to 6 to
97 to 98 [for MAC only] to 2000 (WinWord / Office) and so forth.
 
If we are very near v8 now and DrG's goal is to be a 10 - I wonder what the
succession plan is at SAS Inst.?
-------------------
 
At 03:04 PM 5/13/99 -0400, you wrote:
> I wonder what the rationale was behind this decision.  Unless they've gone
>batty they obviously aren't going to stop producing maintenance releases, so
>are they going to refer to what otherwise would be v8.01 as v9 or are they
>going to go the MS route of issuing service packs (thus condemning us to
>sifting through endless posts along the lines of "You say you're running v8,
>but have you installed SP1,SP2,SP2a and SP2a1?")  I'm not sure I see the
>point of either approach...
 
===================================================================
Internet: mshines@purdue.edu  | Michael S. Hines  CDP,CISA,CIA,CFE
Voice: (765) 494-5338         | Coordinator of Systems and Programming
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