Hacker News Reader

> Upgrading is going from one major version to the next.

> Updating is increasing the minor version, including bug fixes and small patches.

I dont agree with this at all. You could swap the two words and still have a cogent paragraph. what reference do you have for these terms?

View on HN

Somebody let the apt maintainers know they've got it wrong

Right because the English language is maintained by the apt maintainers

I was agreeing with your sentiment. Upgrade doesn't mean what the guy thinks it should, per apt, one of the most widely-used package managers on the planet.

That said, I do disagree with you now. The language used to describe...uhh..."increasing" minor vs major versions is exactly the kind of thing package-manager-maintainers would get to decide on. What do you think, we're going to have a congress of linguists to determine command line flag names?

the point is, those two words are essentially fungible. regardless of who says they mean what, they are not right, unless their definition is that they are basically synonymous.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com