Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases
by Someone1234 on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @02:42PM
(#20998697)
Semantic versioning is useful. Unfortunately the marketers have taken over and there's a numbers race going on.
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Semantic versioning is useful for libraries. Let useful for consumer apps. 2019-10 says more than 76.0.0
> 2019-10 says more than 76.0.0
Neither says anything useful. 2019-10 is no more actionable or informative than 76.0.0. That 2019-10 was released in october 2019 is meaningless information and only "more" in the "babble" sense.
2014-04 is absolutely actionable for a browser.
Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases
by MaulingMonkey on Tuesday September 17, 2019 @09:21PM
(#21001679)
2014-04 is actionable for a lot of stuff - "unpatched" or "unmaintained"...
Well, I don't get an idea if my extension would break changing from version 2019-10 -> 2019-11 without reading the release notes.
I would know it there is a big chance of breakage if I moved from 76.0.0 -> v77.0.0 and I am reasonably certain it won't break if I moved from 76.0.0 -> 76.0.1
Re:Firefox moving to 4 week releases
by diegoperini on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @12:40PM
(#21007127)
But if a website breaks, you can get more idea about why it happened by comparing your current browser's calendar version to the latest update. For example, you will know you are behind x years of updates. With semantic versioning, you don't know how old you have not been updating your installation.
Since there are more websites than extensions, the utilitarian approach would be to choose 2019-10 over 76.0.0.
One approach is proactive and the other reactive. Unless, one checks the release notes every 4 weeks... I would argue the utilitarian approach is exactly the other way. Verify and test if there is an API break with a major version change. Whether the browser is 2 years or 10 years old shouldn't make a difference.
And this supposed marketing advantage only lasted for the first handful of releases, when numbers where under or around 10. Now numbers are so big that they have become totally insignificant. 57? 63? 98? who cares any more?
Furthermore, as another comment said, it is impossible to remember on which release they started breaking this or that, since there is no more major version number change, which is usually handy to indicate backward-incompatible changes.
They increase the major version because they don't guarantee backward compatibility. You may think it's foolish to only provide guaranteed API support for 4 or 6 weeks, but it's more than just a marketing gimmick.