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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

Ehhh... at best it argues that it's over-complicated for something that only ever has a single version running everywhere. Like a web service that you control, for which there will never be a way to request "use that old version of the code instead".[1]

Which is true. But then why even bother with YYMM.xxxx? Just use a single incrementing integer. Or none - nothing can ever go backwards, so callers are required to ignore the version in practice.

[1]: an API presenting an old external interface is something different - there's still only a single "version" of the code that's actually running.

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Yeah okay. I think there is a very large group of developers who work in just such an environment: developing web applications that have a "production" version whether they are public internet or internal to companies where the previous version would literally _never_ be consumed. The reason to track a increment in that kind of environment is as a code to align feature requests to a particular release (usually by date), this is useful for all sorts of internal tracking questions like: was this feature I requested live by 4/1/2016.

I personally dislike using semvar for these instances (my own opinion only) because it feels overcomplicated as you stated. I also learned a long time ago that _any_ kind of date designator was a recipe for answering why the "April" release was actually live on June 1st ;). Recently, I've dropped back to Git SHA-1 which has alignment to a specific version of code released AND can be tracked by date and deploy tools.

So I agree with the thesis, disagree with the solution, but still think ryan_lane did not effectively refute it above.

Yeah, the blog's context isn't about libraries. And agreed, tons of developers work in environments like this.

I pretty much exclusively deal with SHAs too, since tons of tooling understands it, and there's no implied order just by looking at it - which is a good thing. A SHA might be out, but waiting to ramp up to 100%. It does tend to mean "end of (nearly) all dev work" though, which is the actually important part for day-to-day developing.

In the past I've used YYYYMMDDXX as a version number. In my experience there's no real problem with confusion about what the version number means as long as it's automatically generated so there's a clear definition. For me it was "feature merges to master, and master has passed tests". Nothing about actual releases at all, because the version of the code says nothing about what you do with it.

The version deployed is 20160215.2.142001 (on 2016-02-15, there were three deploys, with the latest build affecting them being #142001). There's your date, which is additionally free of the uncertainty whether you meant mm/dd/yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy. How is that incompatible with semver? (Nowhere does it say that the numbers have to be single digits. Integers.)

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