As with any project that makes incremental improvements and releases somewhat regularly, there would never be a point where major version number jump could be justified by the size of the change. The linux kernel faced the same problem a couple of years ago. All the incremental changes in linux-2.6 series summed together were huge, but there never was single big release. So Linus just bumped the version number between two regular releases.Caedo wrote:why this is 3.0 and not 2.7? What bigger things are planned?
Our incremental changes since 2.0 are getting major enough to call release after the next 3.0. And like one point Linus made about Linux entering third decade, freeciv will be well over 20 years old by the time 3.0 gets released (though, if we followed this rationale all the way, it would have made more sense to release 3.0 instead of 2.6 already. But by the time we though about that, 2.6 was already mentioned in so many places it made no sense to start changing that - our time is better spent on real development than adjusting version numbers for no gain at all)