Skip to main content
Software Engineering

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

7
  • 60
    Along the lines of what you've said here, the reality is that people make mistakes, including library authors. Once you've published a mistake like this in your API, it's difficult to resolve without breaking clients. A major release is when such things are addressed by responsible library authors. Commented Sep 2, 2021 at 18:59
  • 52
    Btw, "Major is going to break things" (& Minor is adding new things but backward compatible and Patch is just bugfix) is called Semantic Versioning Commented Sep 3, 2021 at 7:42
  • 2
    What infuriates me is that they then drop the old library. "Ok, now that GTK2 is out, no need to ship GTK+ any more". Or "Now that Java16 is out, no need to ship Java15 any more" — yes, there bloody well is; our build system won't work with Java16. Commented Sep 4, 2021 at 6:51
  • 6
    @EdwardFalk Especially for major libraries that you depend on, you are responsible for knowing their published release plans. For instance, you should know that Java has LTS versions and non-LTS versions, and non-LTS versions will not be supported after the next release. If you need LTS support, use an LTS version. Personally, I'd hate if more languages/libraries took the Python approach of "support the old version forever because people can't be asked to upgrade, splitting the community as people continue to make new code on the old version". Either upgrade, or accept you don't get updates. Commented Sep 4, 2021 at 10:38
  • 2
    @EdwardFalk as long as it's OS, there is no dropping. What was made remains available and usable forever. Of course, people that put out free libraries are not obliged to keep work on some legacy version because you want new features there :) Commented Sep 4, 2021 at 15:49