On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 05:29:44PM +0100, Sven Moritz Hallberg wrote:
What's wrong with the solution I proposed, i.e. to add an explicit field to the package description which states whether we broke compatibility or not? It's effectively the same as a version numbering convention without having to tell everyone how to assign their numbers. Don't get me wrong, I'd be all for a consistent numbering scheme. Is everyone else also?
With version numbers, it suffices that each author has a rule of incrementing at a certain level if compatibility is broken. It need not be the same level for different packages (though that would be less confusing). They might have two levels of compatibility: merely adding functions, types or classes will not break any clients that use explicit imports.