Hacker News Reader

Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, if you're writing software with a lot of breaking changes, SemVer doesn't make much sense, because you'll just quickly get to major version numbers in the hundreds.

View on HN

> The thing is, if you're writing software with a lot of breaking changes, SemVer doesn't make much sense, because you'll just quickly get to major version numbers in the hundreds

“The version number conveys whether there is a breaking change” seems more important than “the version number remains small”, so while the second half may be true, I don’t see how that supports the first half at all.

The problem isn't that it's small, the problem is that if few changes are breaking, then you have "version 5" which is significantly different than "version 4".

Is version 465 very different from version 464 though?

/me points at Firefox

A bit unfair, no? Firefox switched to the "new major version every 6 weeks (or so)" only because Google did that first with Chrome, and people started thinking "Chrome is so much better because it's in version 17 and Firefox is version 3".

> Is version 465 very different from version 464 though?

As soon as: a) you precisely define "very different" AND b) versions 464 and 465 of Firefox and Chrome are available, we can continue discussing :)

Especially when the API surface area is as gigantic as graphviz's.

Still, it's great to see new maintainers with bold ideas.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com