Versioning policy

My old versioning policy was to assign just a release code and a patchlevel, in the form of RELEASE.PATCHLEVEL. This was enough for my projects, but it is no longer because it was very difficult to tell if an increment in the PATCHLEVEL meant just a bugfix or a change deep enough to make impossible to use the new version as a drop in replacement for the old version. This would force an increment in the RELEASE number for medium importance changes, and probably will confuse the users.

So I've decided a change in the versioning policy and adopt the common schema of using a major release code, a minor release code and a patchlevel, in the form of MAJOR.MINOR.PATCHLEVEL. A change in the version code will show more exactly how deep is the update in the software. Here is a reference about the meaning of a code change:

• A change in the PATCHLEVEL will indicate a bugfix or a very minor code change that doesn't make the application to work differently, and WON'T be user visible changes. You can use the new version just in place of the older one, and in the case of a library, it remains binary compatible with the old one.
• A change in the MINOR code will indicate an important change in the code that require to read the list of user visible changes to correctly replace the old version with the new version, due to a minor feature added, changed or removed. The changes needed to do the update will be very small (a file rename, maybe, or something like that) but needed. The change may or may not affect all users of the software. In a library this means that the API has been modified to add or deprecate (but NOT delete) an entrypoint. So it still remains binary compatible with the old version.
• A change in the MAJOR code will indicate a very large, deep and important change in the code, probably a major rewrite or even a change in the behaviour so important that you cannot use the new version without reading the full documentation, not only the user visible changes. If you want to update, be prepared for some work. In a library, this means that the API has substantially changed: some entrypoints have been added, some changed and some removed, and the library is no longer binary compatible with the older versions.

To summarize: a PATCHLEVEL increment just means bugfixes, a MINOR increment means a minor feature change and a MAJOR increment means that the application or library has changed substantially.

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©2004,2005,2006,2007 Raúl Núñez de Arenas Coronado
Et non erat qui cognosceret me
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