A short note about Metacity’s version numbers: they are of the form major.minor.point, as with most software these days. “major.minor” tracks the GNOME release they belong to; thus major will probably be 2 indefinitely and minor will increase by 2 every six months, using the convention laid down by the Linux kernel of using the odd number as the unstable branch and the even number one lower as the stable version into which only bugfixes will go. The first version of Metacity was version 2.3.
The point numbers mark individual releases; they iterate over the Fibonacci series, beginning at F2. (The point numbers of GNOME as a whole iterate over the natural numbers.) There should be at least one Metacity release just before each GNOME release, and at least one every fortnight or so. The main version currently under development (“trunk”, in Subversion language) identifies itself with the version number of the next unstable point release.
Automatic hyperlinking: I will be writing a script which takes text about the day and posts it here. As part of that, I would like to hyperlink names of contributors (including translators!) If you’re likely to be mentioned here and you have a website, let me know what it is.