Versioning

[Jason Miller]

On Fri, 19 Nov 2021 22:02:11 +0100 Erik Huelsmann <ehuels at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I disagree, in the example authentication-1.1.2 upgrades a dependency of
commons-logging from 1.x to 2.x *because* commons-logging changed its API.
Presumably authentication did *not* change it's API because it's following
semver and only incremented the minor version.  However, upgrading from
authentication 1.1.1 to 1.1.2 will break if any other components depend on
commons-logging-1.* since in Lisp (and many other languages) it's not possible
to load two versions of the same system.

So long as two different versions of the same system cannot be used in the same
image, this is a real problem with semver.  How large of a problem it is can
certainly be debated (I don't find it to be that big of an issue in practice).

-Jason