Versioning

[Robert Goldman]

On 19 Nov 2021, at 15:25, Jason Miller wrote:

> 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).


I'm not sure that I see this as a CL-specific problem.  If you have a 
C++ program that uses one boost version and it uses a library that 
requires a different boost version, you have the same problem.

I also don't think that this is a problem with semantic versioning: the 
boost people use what we might call "anti-semantic versioning," but they 
still wreak havoc with the world.  The problem isn't that semantic 
versioning breaks everything, the problem is that different libraries 
evolve at different rates, and that causes stuff to break.

I would argue that this shows the *strength* of semantic versioning: no, 
it doesn't magically solve the problem of version skew, but in at least 
some cases it tells you that you have version skew, and tells you where 
to look for a solution, instead of leaving you flailing around trying to 
figure out why your code has suddenly stopped working.
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