[HN Gopher] What's in a version number? (Or: Musings on backward...
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What's in a version number? (Or: Musings on backwards
compatibility)
Author : genericlemon24
Score : 15 points
Date : 2021-10-07 12:05 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (alexgaynor.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (alexgaynor.net)
| ghoward wrote:
| I like his idea, but it sounds a little hypocritical coming from
| someone who advocated a change that broke _many_ distros builds
| of the Python cryptography package.
|
| Personally, I think he spent his "backwards-incompatibility
| budget" for about 5 _years_ with that change because that 's
| probably how long it will take for the new version of
| cryptography to be widely adopted and supported long-term.
| itamarst wrote:
| If you accept this argument, the next logical step is figuring
| out what features are being used and how. Standard method is just
| guessing, but there's:
|
| 1. What rustc does with crater (linked from article), where you
| can actually test real code. On a smaller scale, the author of
| the article points out cryptography package for Python, which
| runs tests of its most popular upstream dependencies. This latter
| is probably feasible for many libraries.
|
| 2. Analytics, though this requires work to make it private and
| anonymous, and for libraries maybe requires system-level
| infrastructure. (Again, this was suggested by Alex.)
|
| 3. Beta testing, surveys, and other forms of user feedback.
| nammi wrote:
| I was really surprised Rich Hickey's talk wasn't linked to:
| https://youtu.be/oyLBGkS5ICk
| yawnxyz wrote:
| I work with a bunch of biologists and one of my jobs is to find a
| solution for the filename_final_final_FINALNEWEST.xlsx problem...
| thinking about how to convince people to use something like a
| versioning system, or just use a single number, e.g.
| filename-4.xlsx, and write a tool to collapse all those finals
| into a number, e.g. filename_final_final.xlsx into
| filename_final2.xlsx...
|
| I'm still not sure if it's the best way to go about it though.
| But I think version numbering is still much stronger than tacking
| multiple "finals" to a file name. Happy to hear what others are
| doing!
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| The method I use and often encourage other people to use is
| version control latex and csv files and python scripts in git,
| which can do everything MS office does. This has worked exactly
| zero times, so what I encourage others to do instead is...
|
| Use the format filename_YEAR_MO_DY_username.xlsx. This has the
| benefit that Lexicographic ordering every OS does in its file
| explorer is the same as chronological order, so it acts as a
| crude version control system.
| xapata wrote:
| I add a letter to distinguish between updates made on the
| same day: 2021-10-08a, 2021-10-08b. So far no one has been so
| quick with updates that I've gone past z, but I'll have my
| y2k moment someday.
| intrepidhero wrote:
| > The method I use and often encourage other people to use is
| version control latex and csv files and python scripts in
| git, which can do everything MS office does. This has worked
| exactly zero times
|
| Yeah and, sadly, yeah. Someday.
| intrepidhero wrote:
| Been fighting the same fight. Anytime someone sends me a file
| with a with _FINAL_XYZ_approved_modified_etc I delete all that
| stuff and increment the version number before I send it back to
| them. Folks eventually catch on. It helps that I'm the one
| writing procedures for the document management people to
| follow. One surprising (to me) argument against was that people
| don't like it when the first version we produce (meaning our
| group throws it over the wall to another group) is higher than
| version 0. I shrug and say, it's just a number.
|
| Sure there's lots of more robust ways to track versions. But
| the above simple convention is a step function in quality of
| life while requiring hardly any work.
| jasonpeacock wrote:
| I've run into that too. People attach a lot of value to
| version numbers, even for internal projects/releases, and
| it's hard to get their perspective shifted to just accept it
| as communication tool (e.g. semver).
|
| There's nothing special about 1.0.0 vs 2.0.0, it just means
| there was a breaking change and you may need to do some work
| when upgrading.
|
| And a major, awesome feature might get released as 1.15.25 ->
| 1.16.0, that's OK. (marketing hates this)
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