Versioning

[Erik Huelsmann]

On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 10:08 PM Stelian Ionescu <sionescu at cddr.org> wrote:

> It shows that semantic versioning is a bad idea
>

It's not a bad idea. It's badly executed. If humanity would be forbidden to
start executing any good ideas because they will be executed badly, we
wouldn't be doing anything today.

If a library says they adhere to semver and they make a mistake, that's a
bug as much as a coding mistake is a bug. We have means to point this out
to the authors, such as bug trackers. But: the fact that an author releases
a version x.y.z doesn't by itself mean they adhere to semver. so maybe the
author never intended you to assign this meaning to the version number...

Maybe we need a way for a system declaration to indicate whether its
version adheres to semver or not?


Regards,

Erik.


> unless you have automatic ways of diffing an API between two versions
> (such tools exist for C), or the development team has the time and
> resources to very carefully evolve the code.
> What one finds in practice is that authors will wing it and increment
> version numbers if it "feels" like a major change or for publicity reasons
> (new major release, get it while it's hot!).
>
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 9:51 PM Anton Vodonosov <avodonosov at yandex.ru>
> wrote:
>
> - etimmons@, rpgoldman@
>
> "Erik Huelsmann" <ehuels at gmail.com>:
> > Could you elaborate a bit on "As semver does not work for Common Lisp"?
>
> I've opened an issue in the SemVer github repo:
> https://github.com/semver/semver/issues/771
> (Don't want to repeat this explanation over and over in many discussions).
>
>
> "One bad programmer can break more than 10 good ones can fix": the issue
> you raise is bad engineering (increasing the version number simply because
> you can) and is not a problem semantic versioning is trying to solve. What
> it *does* try to solve is that the engineers working on the software can
> see the problems coming. Applications (and libraries) like Subversion have
> managed to stay within the boundaries of semantic versioning for almost 20
> years now, still "stuck" at version 1.x because of it. At the same time
> they have succeeded to add significant new features to the software without
> breaking backward compatibility. So: it's possible. The fact that projects
> like e.g. Cucumber release a new major version every few months says more
> about those projects than about semver.
>
>
>
> I will probably refine the issue description in the future, but it should
> be clear enough already.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Bye,
>
> Erik.
>
> http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP.
> Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.
>
>
>
> --
> Stelian Ionescu
>
>

-- 
Bye,

Erik.

http://efficito.com -- Hosted accounting and ERP.
Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.
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