[Haskell-cafe] Why does Haskell PVP have two values for the major version? "A.B..." and a couple other questions

[Corentin Dupont]

My opinion is that the version number shouldn't convey the idea of
stability. It should be another field :)
In fact in Cabal there is a stability field:
https://www.haskell.org/cabal/users-guide/developing-packages.html#package-properties
But it's not very well specified/used.

Anyway the fact that we like to have "V1.0" to mean "work done" is more a
question of aesthetic.
The version number carries three different informations IMO:
- tagging a specific state of the sources,
- give an order between the versions,
- give information about the level of changes.
The third one could be separated. It could be made into a field containing
the level of changes, such as "minor changes"/"API breaking changes". Then
the version tag could be made what you want, even tagging "V1.0" a minor
change.
Just my 2 cent :)



On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 12:39 PM, Vincent Hanquez <tab at snarc.org> wrote:
>
>
> On 16/12/2014 11:23, Roman Cheplyaka wrote:
>
>> So I need to wait till I have an API-breaking change in order to mark a
>> package as stable? That's... ironic.
>>
> This is one of my issue with the PvP. with the PvP versioning you're not
> able to convey any other informations apart from the API "changing".
>
> Which means you can't properly convey:
>
> * major new features: by bumping the major, despite the API not changing
> * security (by bumping the minor or patchlevel, regardless if the API
> change)
> * the stability (bumping to 1.x).
>
> Text is one of canonical example when it was bumped to 1.x recently and
> lots of people complained that it wasn't the right thing to do.
>
>  Also, if the library is stable enough, people would constraint the A
>> version (e.g. 'containers < 1'), asserting that their package will
>> probably continue to build even under minor API-breaking changes which
>> are typical for stable packages. Now, by bumping my A version for a
>> minor breaking change, I'm acting exactly against their intention,
>> saying "hey, this is a massive change, you'd better pay attention before
>> using it". That's not what an actual stable package is supposed to do.
>>
>>  Indeed.
>
> --
> Vincent
>
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