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Comment by masterj | Hacker News Reader

Why do you care about an imaginary number? FB (and many other large companies) heavily use this in production, and have to migrate their own apps. FB even goes farther and uses the master branch (well, synced every week or so). That's a far heavier endorsement than whatever side of a decimal a number falls on.

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> Why do you care about an imaginary number?

It's not imaginary, it represents stability. By not going 1.0 you are saying it is alpha software and should not be used.

Not everyone has Facebook's budget or resources to upgrade every 2 months.

React upgrade path is stabler and smoother than 90% of >1.0 libraries I have seen. Please don't jump to conclusions. ;-)

It's about the perception that the number provides.

Fixing this is on the roadmap: https://gist.github.com/zpao/6e12ee0f46ce87af2287#versioning

> It's about the perception that the number provides.

And now we're back to the original question, which was "why do you care about an imaginary number?"

> Not everyone has Facebook's budget or resources to upgrade every 2 months.

Even if you're FB, dedicating the engineering time to upgrading/testing/deploying 15k+ components by making a breaking change would be madness.

Anecdotally, when the React team breaks something (rare) a lot of people internally start yelling, and it never makes it into the releases. FB makes for one-hell of an integration test environment.

semver version number is not so much a statement of stability, but a contract between the library producer and consumer.

I care because it's a convention. Without knowing too much about Angular 2, I know that it's got major breaking changes compared to Angular 1. Likewise, I know that a 1.15.2 should upgrade from a 1.15.1 fairly trivially, whereas a 1.16.0 might take a little more consideration.

With all that said, the responses to my question are very reasonable, such as "people I know and respect have used it and stated sane upgrades historically." In the absence of this piece of tech in my own social circle, SemVer is a convention that Facebook will have to live up to. 6 months to a year after Facebook switches to it, I can research how reasonable they are with introducing breaking changes and supporting old, stable versions. I believe that more people will be vocal about a major breaking change post 1.0 than pre-1.0.

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