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In ecosystems with hundreds of dependencies, that requires you to review the changelog and source code of all of them all the time, especially if you want to av
by 9dev 1y ago
In ecosystems with hundreds of dependencies, that requires you to review the changelog and source code of all of them all the time, especially if you want to avoid security issues fixed in more recent versions. I’d rather have a clear indication of something I need to take care of (a new major version), something new I might benefit from (a new minor version), or something that improved the library in some way (a new patch version). That alone slices required effort on my part down considerably.
- quotemstr 1y agoWhat do you mean, "have to take care of something"? You don't have to upgrade to a new major version. The problem with major versions is that they make it too easy to break other people are cause work for them.
- Uvix 1y agoI have to upgrade if I want security fixes. Even if they patch old majors for a time, that’s not perpetual.
- 9dev 1y agoSoftware is churn. Sticking to outdated versions for too long, the rest of the world evolves without you, until other things will start breaking. For example because a new dependency A you need depends on another package B you already have, but A needs a newer version of B than you use. At that point, you have a huge undertaking ahead of you that blocks productivity and comes with a lot of risk of inadvertently breaking something. Whether someone else or I am the problem doesn’t matter to my customers at the end of the day, if I’m unable to ship a feature I’m at fault.
- withinboredom 1y agoSometimes you do have to upgrade. We were using a package that was two years old and the Google APIs it called were renamed one day. I’m sure there was an announcement or something to give us warning, but for whatever reason, we didn’t get them. So that day, everything came crashing to a halt. We spent the afternoon upgrading and then we were done. To say that you don’t have to upgrade is true, but it always comes at a price.
- sgarland 1y agoThat would be ideal, but in practice, SemVer is frequently broken with technicalities or outright disregard for standards. Look at K8s: still on v1, but there have been countless breaking changes. Their argument is that the core application hasn’t changed its API, it’s all of the parts that go into it to make it useful (Ingress, Service, etc.) that have had breaking changes. This is an absurd argument IMO. Then there’s Python - which I dearly love - that uses something that looks exactly like SemVer, but isn’t. This is often confusing for newcomers, especially because most libraries use SemVer.
- michaelcampbell 1y ago> Look at K8s Maybe I'm being too pedantic here, but semver for applications is always going to be broken and driven by marketing. SemVer, for my money, is only applicable realistically to libraries.
- 9dev 1y agoIf a cure was effective on 99.9999% of all patients, would you say that it’s frequently failing? Millions of projects use SemVer just fine. Singling out two behemoths designed by committee to demonstrate SemVer's shortcomings seems misleading.
- BugsJustFindMe 1y ago> Millions of projects use SemVer just fine. This is one of those things that becomes clearly untrue if you try to apply any amount of rigor to the definition of "just fine". I have yet to see a single major Python project claiming to use SemVer that didn't occasionally unintentionally violate the promise made by the versioning because you cannot always easily predict whether a change will be incompatible, and, even if you could, people still regularly just make mistakes because people are not perfect. Versioning is hard. Keeping promises about not breaking things is even harder. That may be good enough for things that don't matter, but it's not good enough for things that matter a lot.