&#62; <i>the latter sort of like Slackware's increment of version numbers from 4 to 7</i><p>That was done because all of the other distros at the time had higher version numbers and people were looking at Slackware with a, "Well, it's only version 4. RedHat/Mandrake/etc are already on version 7!" attitude. I remember there being a written (web) justification for it.