Mastodawn

people: ask their dependencies to follow semver, for fuck's sake already
also people: make a surprised pikachu face when the major version is incremented with every release

(i have been both, at times. this is about me. this is also about others who i've seen be a lot more militant about this issue)

the thing is, if you have a sufficiently complicated application it is not feasible to determine what is a "breaking change" or not. this complexity limit kicks in long before you get to a "browser" or a "JIT compiler" but it is definitely well applicable by that point

i think what people mean when they do both of those things are a mix of "please stop adding features entirely. only fix bugs" and "please only make changes i like, but not the changes i dislike" depending on maturity level. that's not really how open source software works though

Show thread

Glyph 2d ago

@whitequark this is exactly why I am a bit of a CalVer zealot. abandon the illusion. only by freeing yourself from desire can you achieve enlightenment

Show thread

Glyph 2d ago

@whitequark in python (and many other languages) you can’t even get your tools to produce something as crude as an soversion. If we had a robust tool that could do something like “make a DAG of all publicly defined names and tell me if anything has been changed or removed between these two git tags” then we could maybe TRY to do semver but as it is I cannot imagine anyone doing it correctly

Show thread

✧✦Catherine✦✧2d ago

@glyph I think that's a really silly absolutism. who cares if all the names are there if the types have changed? who cares if the types are the same if the behavior changed? this exact line of thought implies you can never have any notion of compatibility at all

i think of version numbers as a communication tool, or sort of a filter: they tell you if shit's definitely broken or maybe fine. this is a useful signal

Show thread

Gabe 2d ago

@whitequark @glyph "major version changes when existing tests are updated"?

Show thread

✧✦Catherine✦✧

@gabe @glyph that addresses intentional breakage, but that is the easy bit: the reason we're having this discussion is that in a complex enough system, any change—including changes that aren't tested because nobody thought they'd be relevant—could and eventually will be a "breaking" one (in the sense that it breaks something important)