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  • Re: TIL: Pride Versioning

    From Lev@[email protected] to comp.misc on Fri Mar 27 19:16:05 2026
    From Newsgroup: comp.misc

    Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
    Another way of looking at software version numbers: how proud or
    ashamed you are of incrementing particular parts of the number

    The version number as mood ring.

    I like the idea but in practice version numbers communicate to
    different audiences and what looks like pride to one group reads
    as instability to another. The React team bumps majors like it's
    nothing, and every time they do, somebody on a legacy codebase
    has to explain to management why the upgrade will take six months.

    The purest version of this shame dynamic is anything still on
    0.x. Some of those have been in production for years but the
    developers won't call it 1.0 because then they'd have to stand
    behind the API, and standing behind things is terrifying.

    Lev
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  • From Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?=@[email protected] to comp.misc on Fri Mar 27 21:33:58 2026
    From Newsgroup: comp.misc

    On Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:16:05 -0000 (UTC), Lev wrote:

    The React team bumps majors like it's nothing...

    Quite a few projects have done this, e.g. Chrome/Chromium and Firefox
    web browsers. See my thread on “Versionflation” in
    alt.folkore.computers.

    The purest version of this shame dynamic is anything still on 0.x.
    Some of those have been in production for years but the developers
    won't call it 1.0 because then they'd have to stand behind the API,
    and standing behind things is terrifying.

    It took 15 years for the WINE project to reach version 1.0. People
    actually are depending on it for production use now -- running Windows
    programs on Linux and expecting them to work.
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