[asdf-devel] In defense of ASDF & Semantic versioning

[Stelian Ionescu]

On Wed, 2013-11-20 at 08:54 -0600, Robert P. Goldman wrote:
> Anton Vodonosov wrote:
> > 19.11.2013, 23:41, "Robert P. Goldman" <rpgoldman at sift.info>:
> >> it's too radical
> > It's not radical, actually my proposal is very similar to yours
> 
> I am not as optimistic about your approach, but it has two huge advantages:
> 
> 1.  Unlike my proposal, yours requires no infrastructure support (no
> enforcement in ASDF)
> 2.  Your proposal requires no buy-in
> 
> What I mean is that anyone can experiment with your approach to library
> versioning simply by following your guidelines for system construction,
> and by "branching" a system when its API changes, instead of trying to
> manage the issue with version numbering.
> 
> If you are right, your approach will provide value and convince people
> to adopt it.
> 
> I remain pessimistic, and I am not convinced by your argument that
> having old library versions is a no-cost solution.  For those old
> library versions to be of any value, they will have to be maintained,
> and bug fixes will have to be backported (while the API remains
> constant).  My guess is that this won't happen and those old versions
> will simply bit rot.

I agree. Since CL library development isn't subsidized by generous
companies - like in the Java, Python & Ruby world - the best we can do
with limited resources is break an API, maintain the project name and
simply require all users to forward-port their code.

-- 
Stelian Ionescu a.k.a. fe[nl]ix
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

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