3 ms·

Yes, the minor version clearly doesn't have much information. Then why should we keep the three-part version number after all?

IanCal 3y ago
It does have information about what's changed. It shouldn't be a patch release and it's not supposed to be a breaking change. Outside of new things it informs you about the work expected with downgrades. Going down in minor versions and you should check for breaking changes or removed functionality.
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  > It shouldn't be a patch release and it's not supposed to be a breaking change. Such change is not distinguishable from a patch release because, according to the semantic versioning, both should be trivial to upgrade. In the other words, if the semantic versioning did work as intended, upgrading from 1.2.3 to 1.2.99 and to 1.42.0 should be same to users. If it's not the case, there should have been some breaking change. And clearly this is not how users feel about the minor version increment. > Outside of new things it informs you about the work expected with downgrades. Going down in minor versions and you should check for breaking changes or removed functionality. If you need downgrades the distinction among major, minor and patch versions does not matter because either: 1. The library author has broken the premise of semantic versioning, or 2. You have entirely separate requirements that are not part of the public API (whatever it is) and thus the library author didn't honor them.
  - IanCal 3y ago
    > Such change is not distinguishable from a patch release because, according to the semantic versioning, both should be trivial to upgrade They're absolutely distinguishable, they convey a different scale of change. Just because you should be able to blindly upgrade doesn't stop that. If nothing else, it indicates there may be deprecations. You don't want to wait until things break before dealing with those. > If you need downgrades the distinction among major, minor and patch versions does not matter because either You've never had to downgrade a package for other reasons like matching a version used elsewhere? Compared versions of a tool with another developer whole debugging? Downgraded due to an introduced bug? None of those break semver. Again this is about communicating.
    - lifthrasiir 3y ago
      > They're absolutely distinguishable, they convey a different scale of change. Minor vs. patch releases are absolutely distinguishable because authors did say so, but changes are not---unless you actually try to use new features. > If nothing else, it indicates there may be deprecations. You don't want to wait until things break before dealing with those. Deprecations are not breaking changes, so it shouldn't matter anyway. The semver rule of requiring the minor version for deprecations is pretty silly. I do see the intention---give enough time before the actual removal---but the rule is too strong and smells of retrofitting. Semver's unclear distinction between minor vs. patch versions is also visible from the coexistence of "caret" requirements and "tilde" requirements in many semver-enabled systems. The former can upgrade to any minor versions, while the latter won't if the required version is specified in the full three-part form. Which one should I use? Depends on packages? Is that any different from having a different versioning scheme per package? > You've never had to downgrade a package for other reasons like matching a version used elsewhere? Compared versions of a tool with another developer whole debugging? Downgraded due to an introduced bug? None of those break semver. I do a lot of downgrading, but I don't trust semver and at least test them again (and look at actual changes if I can). Bugs do not break semver, but at that point the very reason to trust semver also disappears. Also, consider the case where x.y.0 has introduced a new feature I need and also a new shiny bug. Obviously I can't no longer downgrade and semver offers no other solution. The common way to deal with this is to fork and vendor local changes (I did encounter this situation as recent as 2 months ago). I should note that semver in principle should have prevented this for other x.y.z versions (z > 0), but bugs introduced by x.y.z are much rarer than x.y.0 because x.y.z are supposed to be bugfix-only releases anyway.
      - IanCal 3y ago
        > Minor vs. patch releases are absolutely distinguishable because authors did say so, but changes are not---unless you actually try to use new features. I'm not understanding, sorry. There are changes that fit in minor that don't in patch - they're not equivalent. I think we have crossed wires somewhere on this point. > Semver's unclear distinction between minor vs. patch versions is also visible from the coexistence of "caret" requirements and "tilde" requirements in many semver-enabled systems. The former can upgrade to any minor versions, while the latter won't if the required version is specified in the full three-part form. Which one should I use? Depends on packages? Is that any different from having a different versioning scheme per package? Tilde is "this patch and above don't go to a new minor version". Caret is the same but allows minor upgrades. Which you use depends on your project and testing, and yeah you can base it on what the maintainer is like. Some projects break all the time and you don't want even patch releases. I'm not really sure why they added those tbh I'd prefer just ranges. They're just shorthand for ranges anyway. Again, it's about communication. Some people being bad at communicating or maintaining software doesn't make communication pointless. It brings the problem down to one versioning scheme, which you can rely on to different degrees. The overrides are then significantly more contained than having scores of various different things with formats that require different parsing despite looking identical. You instead have one thing and if you're unlucky you have a misbehaving package in your dependencies. > Deprecations are not breaking changes, so it shouldn't matter anyway. Yes, which is why it isn't a major change. This is all about the maintainer communicating with you that this is more than a patch > Also, consider the case where x.y.0 has introduced a new feature I need and also a new shiny bug. Obviously I can't no longer downgrade and semver offers no other solution. Semver doesn't fix bugs no, but I don't understand the problem you're describing. That would be followed by a patch release with the same minor versions number right? How does semver make any claims to prevent bugs being introduced? If it's a local change you make would you have a distinct package? If you want to have the same package name just make a patch number yourself and mark it pre-release. That's literally what it is right - a patch that's not yet released.
kibwen 3y ago
Just because one person doesn't find a piece of information useful doesn't mean that everyone else doesn't. Semver is a useful foundation to build versioning semantics upon, and nothing more. I find all three components to be useful for communicating the scope of changes in any given version, and tools like the OP that enforce these assumptions make semver even more useful. If you think that patch versions are useless, then you're free to omit them in your own libraries.
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  I never said patch versions are useless. I pointed out that minor and patch versions in the semantic versioning are not very different from each other, in particular compared with major versions. I do use three-part versions, as people had done much before the semver, but people also have used two-part versions and decimal-based versions, not to mention multiple flavors of four-part versions as well. And tools like cargo-semver-checks are actually useful even in the absence of any versioning, because they directly tell which version is compatible with others. They make semver (or any other versioning schemes) more useful, but semver does not make them useful. If I seem to attack a weird strawman, you are not very wrong. Semver is useless but doesn't hurt much either. Semver can somehow encode one-part and two-part versions as well by appending excess zeros. I'm much more concerned that embracing semver (or really any other alternative versioning scheme) makes us overlook the actual problem---versions may detect but can't fix breaking changes. A vast majority of breaking changes is mechanically fixable, and we all know how it is beneficial. We should embrace a method to reduce perceived breaking changes, not a method to point out possible breaking changes.
  - kibwen 3y ago
    > A vast majority of breaking changes is mechanically fixable, and we all know how it is beneficial. We should embrace a method to reduce perceived breaking changes, not a method to point out possible breaking changes. These seem like entirely distinct goals that should be pursued separately. Yes, from the perspective of a library consumer, any breaking change is a problem. But from the perspective of a library author, there's a crucial distinction between breaking changes that I intended to make and breaking changes that I didn't intend to make. The tool in the OP is for use by library authors, with the goal of eliminating unintentional breaking changes, and thereby reducing the number of breaking changes that my users are forced to endure. And what you're asking for is a tool to be used by library consumers, in order to mitigate intentional breaking changes. Both these tools can exist, and both benefit (at least marginally) from semver. Semver isn't a panacea, it's just the simplest possible foundation to communicate ideas about versioning. It's entirely welcome to invent concepts beyond semver to perform even more advanced communication.

IanCal 3y ago

It does have information about what's changed. It shouldn't be a patch release and it's not supposed to be a breaking change. Outside of new things it informs you about the work expected with downgrades. Going down in minor versions and you should check for breaking changes or removed functionality.

lifthrasiir 3y ago
> It shouldn't be a patch release and it's not supposed to be a breaking change. Such change is not distinguishable from a patch release because, according to the semantic versioning, both should be trivial to upgrade. In the other words, if the semantic versioning did work as intended, upgrading from 1.2.3 to 1.2.99 and to 1.42.0 should be same to users. If it's not the case, there should have been some breaking change. And clearly this is not how users feel about the minor version increment. > Outside of new things it informs you about the work expected with downgrades. Going down in minor versions and you should check for breaking changes or removed functionality. If you need downgrades the distinction among major, minor and patch versions does not matter because either: 1. The library author has broken the premise of semantic versioning, or 2. You have entirely separate requirements that are not part of the public API (whatever it is) and thus the library author didn't honor them.
- IanCal 3y ago
  > Such change is not distinguishable from a patch release because, according to the semantic versioning, both should be trivial to upgrade They're absolutely distinguishable, they convey a different scale of change. Just because you should be able to blindly upgrade doesn't stop that. If nothing else, it indicates there may be deprecations. You don't want to wait until things break before dealing with those. > If you need downgrades the distinction among major, minor and patch versions does not matter because either You've never had to downgrade a package for other reasons like matching a version used elsewhere? Compared versions of a tool with another developer whole debugging? Downgraded due to an introduced bug? None of those break semver. Again this is about communicating.
  - lifthrasiir 3y ago
    > They're absolutely distinguishable, they convey a different scale of change. Minor vs. patch releases are absolutely distinguishable because authors did say so, but changes are not---unless you actually try to use new features. > If nothing else, it indicates there may be deprecations. You don't want to wait until things break before dealing with those. Deprecations are not breaking changes, so it shouldn't matter anyway. The semver rule of requiring the minor version for deprecations is pretty silly. I do see the intention---give enough time before the actual removal---but the rule is too strong and smells of retrofitting. Semver's unclear distinction between minor vs. patch versions is also visible from the coexistence of "caret" requirements and "tilde" requirements in many semver-enabled systems. The former can upgrade to any minor versions, while the latter won't if the required version is specified in the full three-part form. Which one should I use? Depends on packages? Is that any different from having a different versioning scheme per package? > You've never had to downgrade a package for other reasons like matching a version used elsewhere? Compared versions of a tool with another developer whole debugging? Downgraded due to an introduced bug? None of those break semver. I do a lot of downgrading, but I don't trust semver and at least test them again (and look at actual changes if I can). Bugs do not break semver, but at that point the very reason to trust semver also disappears. Also, consider the case where x.y.0 has introduced a new feature I need and also a new shiny bug. Obviously I can't no longer downgrade and semver offers no other solution. The common way to deal with this is to fork and vendor local changes (I did encounter this situation as recent as 2 months ago). I should note that semver in principle should have prevented this for other x.y.z versions (z > 0), but bugs introduced by x.y.z are much rarer than x.y.0 because x.y.z are supposed to be bugfix-only releases anyway.
    - IanCal 3y ago
      > Minor vs. patch releases are absolutely distinguishable because authors did say so, but changes are not---unless you actually try to use new features. I'm not understanding, sorry. There are changes that fit in minor that don't in patch - they're not equivalent. I think we have crossed wires somewhere on this point. > Semver's unclear distinction between minor vs. patch versions is also visible from the coexistence of "caret" requirements and "tilde" requirements in many semver-enabled systems. The former can upgrade to any minor versions, while the latter won't if the required version is specified in the full three-part form. Which one should I use? Depends on packages? Is that any different from having a different versioning scheme per package? Tilde is "this patch and above don't go to a new minor version". Caret is the same but allows minor upgrades. Which you use depends on your project and testing, and yeah you can base it on what the maintainer is like. Some projects break all the time and you don't want even patch releases. I'm not really sure why they added those tbh I'd prefer just ranges. They're just shorthand for ranges anyway. Again, it's about communication. Some people being bad at communicating or maintaining software doesn't make communication pointless. It brings the problem down to one versioning scheme, which you can rely on to different degrees. The overrides are then significantly more contained than having scores of various different things with formats that require different parsing despite looking identical. You instead have one thing and if you're unlucky you have a misbehaving package in your dependencies. > Deprecations are not breaking changes, so it shouldn't matter anyway. Yes, which is why it isn't a major change. This is all about the maintainer communicating with you that this is more than a patch > Also, consider the case where x.y.0 has introduced a new feature I need and also a new shiny bug. Obviously I can't no longer downgrade and semver offers no other solution. Semver doesn't fix bugs no, but I don't understand the problem you're describing. That would be followed by a patch release with the same minor versions number right? How does semver make any claims to prevent bugs being introduced? If it's a local change you make would you have a distinct package? If you want to have the same package name just make a patch number yourself and mark it pre-release. That's literally what it is right - a patch that's not yet released.

kibwen 3y ago

Just because one person doesn't find a piece of information useful doesn't mean that everyone else doesn't. Semver is a useful foundation to build versioning semantics upon, and nothing more. I find all three components to be useful for communicating the scope of changes in any given version, and tools like the OP that enforce these assumptions make semver even more useful. If you think that patch versions are useless, then you're free to omit them in your own libraries.

lifthrasiir 3y ago
I never said patch versions are useless. I pointed out that minor and patch versions in the semantic versioning are not very different from each other, in particular compared with major versions. I do use three-part versions, as people had done much before the semver, but people also have used two-part versions and decimal-based versions, not to mention multiple flavors of four-part versions as well. And tools like cargo-semver-checks are actually useful even in the absence of any versioning, because they directly tell which version is compatible with others. They make semver (or any other versioning schemes) more useful, but semver does not make them useful. If I seem to attack a weird strawman, you are not very wrong. Semver is useless but doesn't hurt much either. Semver can somehow encode one-part and two-part versions as well by appending excess zeros. I'm much more concerned that embracing semver (or really any other alternative versioning scheme) makes us overlook the actual problem---versions may detect but can't fix breaking changes. A vast majority of breaking changes is mechanically fixable, and we all know how it is beneficial. We should embrace a method to reduce perceived breaking changes, not a method to point out possible breaking changes.
- kibwen 3y ago
  > A vast majority of breaking changes is mechanically fixable, and we all know how it is beneficial. We should embrace a method to reduce perceived breaking changes, not a method to point out possible breaking changes. These seem like entirely distinct goals that should be pursued separately. Yes, from the perspective of a library consumer, any breaking change is a problem. But from the perspective of a library author, there's a crucial distinction between breaking changes that I intended to make and breaking changes that I didn't intend to make. The tool in the OP is for use by library authors, with the goal of eliminating unintentional breaking changes, and thereby reducing the number of breaking changes that my users are forced to endure. And what you're asking for is a tool to be used by library consumers, in order to mitigate intentional breaking changes. Both these tools can exist, and both benefit (at least marginally) from semver. Semver isn't a panacea, it's just the simplest possible foundation to communicate ideas about versioning. It's entirely welcome to invent concepts beyond semver to perform even more advanced communication.