3 ms·

I think the difference between minors that include non-stop breaking features and patches actually is important. If you run a mission-critical system you want t

• neilv 5y ago
  Good point. If we had something PLaneT-like, I wonder this-is-important-security-fix should be included in the version number (maybe a big `S` suffix), or separate. Or whether it much matters. Security fixes are exceptional situations, requiring scrutiny from developers and also sometimes by end users. To understand the implications, what's affected, the urgency, any other impact, etc. And we also have situations like a popular distro often shipping regressions in their security updates (including a "bricking" one for some hardware platforms last year, which threatened some appliances I had installed overseas). Given this need for scrutiny by at least developers, I don't know whether having is-a-security-update information in the version number itself helps, or is just as well (or better) represented separately. One distinction that might be intuitive and relevant... We already know that is-backward-compatible-with-previous-version(s) is something that could be handled more flexibly separate from the version number, such as for updating changing knowledge about that after a version release -- but there's lightweight benefits to being able to talk about that in a version number, such as in the import line. But the import line doesn't need to talk about security update handling, and probably shouldn't.