On 12/30/20 2:47 PM, David A. Wheeler wrote:
most programs of autoconf’s size have switched to semantic versioning (SemVer), where 3 numbers are required.
Many programs use SemVer, but many don't. Emacs doesn't. Coreutils doesn't. Grep doesn't. Mailutils doesn't. GNU parallel doesn't. Ubuntu doesn't. Chromium doesn't. iOS doesn't. There are lots of other examples.
Even GCC doesn't really use SemVer. Sure, GCC's version numbers have three parts but they've essentially given up on SemVer-style releases since GCC 5.1 came out in 2015.
More to the point, Autoconf's sister project Automake uses SemVer and it's not worked well. For example, features regularly get added in patch versions even though SemVer says not to do that.
SemVer has its place (e.g., OO libraries where every little detail matters) but it's not at all clear that Autoconf is a good place for it.
It’s often unclear if “2.70” is before “2.8”. When there are 3 numbers, the version number Is unambiguously *not* a real number & the confusion mostly disappears.
That hasn't been a problem since Autoconf 2.10 came out in 1996, and at the rate we're going it won't be a problem again until and unless Autoconf 2.100 comes out in (say) 2049. (We can worry about it then. :-)
