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It seems impossible to solve this by just everyone adopting a manifesto that one GitHub guy wrote many years ago and which has been adopted in some communities

It seems impossible to solve this by just everyone adopting a manifesto that one GitHub guy wrote many years ago and which has been adopted in some communities but not in many others. And besides there is plenty of (1) human judgement about what is breaking and not (which goes against machine-readability), and (2) worrying about the minutiae of what is a “patch” and a “feature”, and (3) weird implicit social taboos about doing major releases “too often” (?).[1][2] Most things might be solved by everyone doing SemVer. And for all I know some communities might be running like greased pigs in a chute exactly because they use SemVer (I don’t tend to hear about the everyday everything-is-working stories on HN). But also doing static linking a bit more seems like it would help a lot with the same problem. [1] All based on discussions I’ve seen. Not really personal experience. [2] Again, making a spec/manifesto which is both about machine-readability and about shaming people for vague things is very muddled. Although I don’t know how much the latter is about the culture around it rather than the spec itself.

palata 3y ago
Good points. > It seems impossible to solve this by just everyone adopting a manifesto that one GitHub guy wrote many years ago Well by "semver" I mostly mean "change the major number to indicate a change of ABI", I don't mind so much about the other numbers in this case. But that's a good question: I don't know when it started being a thing. I would guess much, much earlier than GitHub, though. > human judgement about what is breaking and not Hmmm... ABI compatibility for the public interface is not really subjective, or is it? > weird implicit social taboos about doing major releases “too often” Yes I don't get that one and I fight hard against it. > But also doing static linking a bit more seems like it would help a lot with the same problem. Well I am not fundamentally against static linking; to me it makes sense to do a mix, with the caveat that if you link something statically, then you are the maintainer of that code. Whereas if you link a system library dynamically, you merely depend on it. My problem is about moving to "static linking only" (or "by default", but I don't even know if Rust allows dynamic linking at all?).

palata 3y ago

Good points. > It seems impossible to solve this by just everyone adopting a manifesto that one GitHub guy wrote many years ago Well by "semver" I mostly mean "change the major number to indicate a change of ABI", I don't mind so much about the other numbers in this case. But that's a good question: I don't know when it started being a thing. I would guess much, much earlier than GitHub, though. > human judgement about what is breaking and not Hmmm... ABI compatibility for the public interface is not really subjective, or is it? > weird implicit social taboos about doing major releases “too often” Yes I don't get that one and I fight hard against it. > But also doing static linking a bit more seems like it would help a lot with the same problem. Well I am not fundamentally against static linking; to me it makes sense to do a mix, with the caveat that if you link something statically, then you are the maintainer of that code. Whereas if you link a system library dynamically, you merely depend on it. My problem is about moving to "static linking only" (or "by default", but I don't even know if Rust allows dynamic linking at all?).