The dictatorship of versioning

[Drake Wilson]

Didier Verna wrote:
>   Hi,
> 
> in general, I don't like the way ASDF tries to force you to comply with
> its own design choices and policy. This is especially true for component
> versioning. ASDF complains that it doesn't like my version numbers
> (which, in fact, are not only numbers ;-), but I'm not ready to give up
> on them. They're much more informative than ASDF's simplistic 1.2.3.

Counterpoint: humans have to be able to read and compare the version numbers
reliably too.  I have a tendency to prefer intra-system-definition-facility
standardization of version formats for that and similar reasons (for instance,
Debian packages have a similar albeit richer constraint).  I would be more in
favor of a way of specifying both "standardized version" and "flavorful version".

Weaker counterpoint: metadata analyzers may want to read version numbers without
having to integrate arbitrary code from the systems too (but I don't know whether
this is currently practical in the first place).

Curiosity: what _are_ your version numbers like, and how do you compare them?
It was a little too hard to find this readily from your website.  Maybe seeing
a good example would help.

   ---> Drake Wilson