Suggestive versioning
i have now posted about copyright and software versioning so i guess i have a real tech blog
@Lady
> [The number M of a version string M.N.P] increments further upon the removal of behaviour that existing production systems are expected to depend on.
I can sort of guess, but what are the messages/suggestions intended for the user of the software/library when incrementing like this?
(And -- older (more widely relied-on? more corporate?) software projects have multiple "current" version, each packed in turn with the relevant patches. Does this have relevance to any standard practices of those? or is it informed by those?)
@gaditb i think the message is just to read the changelog and be prepared to allocate resources to the upgrade.
this versioning scheme is informed by lived experience dealing with dependency trees, which is the use·case semver is designed for. one expects when upgrading a dependency to a new patch version, that they will not need to do much work. conversely, when upgrading to a new major version, the upgrade will probably not be trivial. the intention is just to make those expectations the actual basis of the versioning scheme, rather than something inferred from a kind of technical formalism regarding a “public a·p·i”.
i think it is entirely possible to maintain multiple versions with patches simultaneously under this system, and that it is in fact a description of what many people are already doing when they version software. but the formalism of semantic versioning often intervenes to make this signal muddier than it needs to be.
