Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Re: Trying to install binary-0.4

On Thursday 18 October 2007 21:15, you wrote:

Daniel McAllansmith writes:

...

3. Otherwise, major.minor MUST remain the same (other version components MAY change).

Is it an option to say SHOULD rather than MUST here?

Of course, SHOULD is an option just like MAY is. But both SHOULD and MAY reduce what you can reliably infer from a version number in the same way. If the rule is SHOULD or MAY, and the freedom is exercised, compatible versions of a package will differ in major[.minor] and dependent packages will be unable to benefit from their release. You'll need more maintenance work on package dependencies if you want to use the latest and greatest versions. In a similar way, if packages are being retained for a 'long time' to ensure dependent packages remain buildable, you are losing garbage collection opportunities. I'm pretty certain SHOULD will be far more socially acceptable than MUST. I can appreciate the fact that people are accustomed to incrementing version numbers in liberal ways. But if you look at version numbers dispassionately in the context of "The goal of a versioning system is to inform clients of a package of changes to that package that might affect them..." MUST seems a better choice. Maybe the Right Way of informing clients is full-on metadata and typing of packages and maybe we'll have that soon, so maybe a socially acceptable, weaker versioning scheme is acceptable.

There are other reasons for a version bump than breaking compatibility.

Technical reasons? In some cases a major bump would just be devolving to a minor bump. Dan