It is just as disingenuous as saying "details don't matter". bonzini's comment was saying a line needs to be drawn, and I agree with that. It's pretty clear the line needs to not include "breaking on version number updates", less clear what it also needs to not include.

No, in fact, it is pretty obvious, at least to people doing kernel dev.

The contract in this case is that there will always be a version number, and anyone who expects it not to change is an idiot or just being obtuse.

Well, I do kernel dev. I am the maintainer of KVM. :)

> anyone who expects it not to change is an idiot or just being obtuse

If this was the case, Microsoft would have never had to skip from Windows 8 to Windows 10 (see below in another comment: "starts with Windows 9" was used in the wild to detect Windows 95/98).

Eh? The version number changed. MSFT just changed to something not completely predictable in advance. Or am I missing your point?

They _had_ to change it to "10" because there was existing code in the wild that misbehaved for a hypothetical Windows 9.

I still don't get it; either I'm remarkably dense today, or there's a disconnect. I wrote:

> anyone who expects it not to change

And you appear to be using an example of a version-change curiosity as a counterexample. It is not a counterexample, because the version number in question changed from 8 to 10. In my original formulation, anyone who claimed to worry that the number would stay 8 forever was being an idiot or being obtuse.

I think that holds up. It was not part of my comment, but someone who expected it to be 9 would not be an idiot or obtuse, because that would have been a reasonable guess, absent additional information. They were expecting it to change but were surprised by an exceptional circumstance.

But this is getting a bit silly; there may be someone out there who thinks version numbers should be immutable across versions, but I bet they're pretty lonely. It was an example picked up while making a wider point.