So! I'm going to talk about Semantic Versioning today because it's something that I think everyone should be using. Why? Because it takes something that is largely arbitrary and meaningless and redeems it by giving it meaning. A side effect of the system is that everyone thinks a little more about how their software changes affect those who actually use it.
How's this whole Semantic Versioning thing work? Well essentially it's a set of conventions for how version numbers are changed when software is altered. I recommend reading the whole description here, but I'll give you the TL;DR version. The idea is that versions should take the form X.Y.Z where each letter is an integer (e.g. 2.5.17). Each number has it's own meaning; MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH
X = MAJOR-version: This is incremented any time the new API is not back compatible with an API you've previously shipped. It doesn't matter how different it is, if the API acts differently, change the MAJOR version.
Y = MINOR-version: This is incremented when the API is changed, but it's completely back compatible with previous versions of this MAJOR release. Use this when ADDING features to your API.
Z = PATCH-version: This is incremented when you make bugfixes that don't affect the API.
The idea is to allow devs to reason about when/how to update their dependencies. Under this system, the dev knows that they can safely update to any version that changes the MINOR or PATCH versions, but that a change in the MAJOR version will mean API alterations which may break their application.
It's as simple as that. Read semver.org for more info on all of this, and start using this system TODAY!
Cheers!
Hopefully you learned something 🤞! If you did, please consider checking out my book: It teaches the principles of using optics in Haskell and other functional programming languages and takes you all the way from an beginner to wizard in all types of optics! You can get it here. Every sale helps me justify more time writing blog posts like this one and helps me to continue writing educational functional programming content. Cheers!