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Posts Tagged with “versioning”

December 16, 2009
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The Importance of Semantic Versioning

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I don’t know if it’s just the last sprint before the end of the year for people, but there’s been a decent amount of buzz around software versioning lately. Maybe people (like Mirko Jahn) are just so frustrated with the status quo around versioning.

Frustration

In the first case, the OSGi community has been blogging about the importance of semantic versioning in regards to the blah approach taken by the Jigsaw project. I find that Peter Kriens wrote an eloquent post about the importance of versioning in module systems like OSGi, especially when it comes to the semantics. In response to JSR 294’s versioning policy (vaguely Debian-like strings), Alex Blewitt has written a funny “JSR294 Fantasy Version Series” featuring a Linux and Roman Numeral versioning scheme. I highly recommend reading Alex’s blog series if you’re in need of a laugh.

I also learned today that the Groovy project is going through a modularization stage since the main Groovy JAR is now over 4MB and there’s a desire to break things apart (I wonder what monsters lurk under that big JAR). I hope the Groovy team considers a hard look at OSGi and also the importance of semantic versioning for its modules. Since it seems Groovy uses Maven as part of its build infrastructure, it should be easy to adopt OSGi with the upcoming Maven3 release and Tycho.

Ok, what about modularity and versioning outside the Java world? Well, to my surprise and excitement, there’s some activity in the Javascript space via the CommonJS group. The purpose of the CommonJS group is to build a JavaScript ecosystem for web servers, desktop and command line apps. As part of this effort, the group is developing a module and package system. While I still think they are a bit crazy, I’m happy to see that they are standardizing their versioning scheme (called SemVer) to include semantics.

If you look deeper into CommonJS and their module system, a lot of the metadata that they are defining for their modules map quite nicely to OSGi. Is it time that OSGi considers stepping out of the comfortable Java space and embrace modularity for other languages like JavaScript? There’s a lot of lessons the OSGi community can give to the modularity newcomers.

Has anyone seen anything else good when it comes to modularity and software versioning?

On a side note, sometimes I wonder if we need something like the Agile Manifesto but for Semantic Verisoning. I’d call it a Semantic Versioning Manifesto where people could sign it and support it. What do people think?

November 19, 2009
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Software Versioning is Ridiculous

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Alright, I have to vent and go on a diatribe as its been awhile.

I was in the process of updating my iPhone and was greeted with these updates.

iPhone Update

1.34? 1.7f? Why does Apple even bother showing the version number. I don’t even know what version of the software was previously installed. As a user, I only really care if there’s an update and what is included in that update. That’s it.

The way software engineers treat version numbers is sad. Since the inception of software, we haven’t been able to come up with a reasonable versioning scheme that can be shared across technologies. Even worse, versions really mean nothing. On top of that, we confuse marketing version numbers with internal software version numbers. Here are some examples of what I’ve come across.

Let’s start with Java. 1.0.3, 1.1.2, 1.4.2, 1.5.0, 1.6.0? Why both with the “1” in the version number?

Next up we have is Windows… 3.1, 2000, XP, ME and 7. Awesome.

I remember when Netscape magically went from version 4 to 6. You know, we didn’t really need a version 5 because IE was already at version 6. We can’t let our competitors out version us.

In Linux… 2.3, 2.4.0, 2.6.8, 2.6.8.1… it’s cool when you can start adding version segments. Linux also seems to suffer the Java problem where the first digit is meaningless… maybe Linus’ favorite number is 2. On the bright side, the second segment in the version number at least signifies whether the code is considered stable or not. I’ll give bonus points to Linux for that.

SmallEiffel… -0.87, -0.79, -0.74… nice… software versions that start on the negative scale and apparently count down to zero.

In areas where modules exist and there’s a goal of reusable components (think OSGi and Maven), there’s a standard version scheme with a recommended policy on how to handle version changes. The only problem is that not everyone follows the scheme given their experience where version numbers mean nothing. It also doesn’t help that version schemes may be different amongst similar component technologies.

In the end, there really needs to be two types of versions, one for the marketing department and one for the development department. Confusing the two types is bad. It’s good to see that I’m not the only one that feels like this, there’s some funny commentary by Jeff Atwood on versioning.

Shame on us in the software industry for letting this crap continue.