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 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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