Re: [OFFTOPIC] Semver

[Yuri Khan <yuri.v.khan@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 6 Jul 2021 at 16:57, Emanuel Berg via Users list for the GNU
Emacs text editor <help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org> wrote:


> OK, but if minor should be "forward not OK, backward OK" that
> means it can't be update when drop stuff, only when you add
> stuff, the the supposedly major number will keep track of
> that... Wow, I'm soo excited to get the new version 2.0.0,
> I wonder what stuff they have dropped??

Yeah exactly. When you see a new major version in a semantically
versioned program/library, the emotion you feel is not excitement but
anxiety: what did they break this time? Is it something I was attached
to?

Of course, from the maintainer’s side, the situation is reversed:
“Woo! 57.0, we can finally drop that legacy API we’ve had to support
for the last several years, and that has been holding us back from
refactoring a whole subsystem because that would break every user of
that API!”

> > When we say “version 4.5.3 is forward-compatible with
> > 4.5.1”, we mean “Any software that works with 4.5.3 will
> > also work with 4.5.1”.
>
> OK, but on that level by definition everything is compatible
> with everything, right?

You mean, on the level of only patch number change? Should be, yes.
That’s why feature additions increment the minor version component.