3 ms·
It used to work that way, though; software in the 90s and early 2000s did have sane semantic versioning, updates were backported to earlier major versions, and
by thaumaturgy 10y ago
It used to work that way, though; software in the 90s and early 2000s did have sane semantic versioning, updates were backported to earlier major versions, and revision updates generally didn't break anything in production.
I bet semantic versioning is mostly championed by older veterans who have worked in maintenance or systems administration roles and are trying to get the industry to return to a versioning system that made sense once upon a time.
For my part ... while I'd dearly love to see semantic versioning come back, along with a few other good habits from a long time ago, I've given up on that and now just accept that updates will break things sometimes and there's always something to update and so something will be broken most of the time and that's just how it is so charge accordingly.
- taeric 10y agoI think there used to just be less things versioned. Conway's law is probably hiding here. If there is an org to maintain it, it will be maintained. If you have more things to maintain than you do org structures, something is not getting maintenance.
- flomo 10y agoI half-agree with you, because at some point, software versioning and the notion of stable apis went all post-modern (especially with open source). But we used to pay software vendors a lot of money to care about boring things like backwards-compatibility, legacy support, and etc. Semantic versioning as a standard is a way of applying social pressure to authors to do the 'dirty work', regardless of whether they are being paid to do so. And if they don't feel like it, the result is usually "too bad for you". There's no real good answer for this that I can think of. Nobody wants to pay for leftpad.js Enterprise Edititon.
- eeZah7Ux 10y agoA lot of people are still doing that, including Linux distributions. Keeping earlier major versions alive and backporting security fixes is very useful.
- Sean1708 10y agoI'm not sure I understand your argument. If someone's not going to backport a v2.1 fix to v1.6, why would they backport a v20170106-1009 fix to v201610-1005?
- taeric 10y agoI'm not sure what you are saying. My argument is that it is a myth that most things will get only security updates. That is, the version scheme States the point is to somehow be in a position to get only security updates. However, unless there is an org specifically for maintaining a library, your only hope of getting updates is to take all updates. So, to stay on the latest.
- Sean1708 10y agoI think I must have got myself confused at some point, disregard my previous comment.