logoalt Hacker News

moron4hireyesterday at 3:05 PM3 repliesview on HN

Personally, I think the 0 major version is a bad idea. I hear the desire to not want to have to make guarantees about stability in the early stages of development and you don't want people depending on it. But hiding that behind "v0.x" doesn't change the fact that you are releasing versions and people are depending on it.

If you didn't want people to depend on your package (hence the word "dependency") then why release it? If your public interface changes, bump that major version number. What are you afraid of? People taking your project seriously?


Replies

jaapzyesterday at 3:19 PM

0.x is not that you don't want people depending on it, you just don't want them to come and complain when you quickly introduce some breaking changes. The project is still in development, it might be stable enough for use in "real projects(tm)", but it might also still significantly change. It is up to the user to decide whether they are OK with this.

1.x communicates (to me at least) you are pretty happy with the current state of the package and don't see any considerable breaking changes in the future. When 2.x comes around, this is often after 1.x has been in use for a long time and people have raised some pain points that can only be addressed by breaking the API.

show 2 replies
mort96yesterday at 3:13 PM

Versioning is communication. I find it useful to communicate, through using version 0.x, "this is not a production ready library and it may change at any time, I provide no stability guarantees". Why might I release it in that state? Because it might still be useful to people, and people who find it useful may become contributors.

show 1 reply
maxlohyesterday at 5:43 PM

[dead]