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I like Semver. Not because it guarantees that a minor bump won't break anything, but that the maintainers expect it shouldn't. If I need to bump a version with
by tikkabhuna 5y ago
I like Semver. Not because it guarantees that a minor bump won't break anything, but that the maintainers expect it shouldn't.
If I need to bump a version with Semver, I can estimate how long it will take. Going from log4j 1.2.17 to 2.17.1 will be bigger than going from 2.16.0 to 2.17.0. And 2.17.0 to 2.17.1 should be easy.
I completely agree with your last paragraph, though. I'll take a collection of utilities from a well known organisation over many tiny dependencies any day.
- simiones 5y agoAbsolutely, Semver is a good idea as a way of organizing your software's versions. But basing your pacakge manager on the specification of Semver seems like a bad idea to me - though it is extremely popular in the industry currently (NPM, Cargo, go mod, and others support it).
- WorldMaker 5y agoIt's tough to remember that the "sem" in "semver" stands for "semantic" and implies "meaningful to other software developers". I understand why we like to try to automate it, but aspects of it were intentional rejections of automated version numbers in the first place and it feels like a cycle of automating things, finding failures in them when automated, and trying to remind ourselves why we shouldn't just automate every aspect of our jobs. Sometimes you need the "semantics", the human judgment calls.