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Comment by aboodman | Hacker News Reader

What about: Google "New Major Version Every Six Weeks or Die Trying" Chrome.

I respect the simplicity of Chrome's versioning scheme.

99% of people using SemVer actually only have two types of change:

1. "Updating will probably work, but you should test anyway in case we've introduced a regression or you depend on behaviour we've decided was a bug"

2. "Updating might not work, depending on which features you're using, but you should test anyway and you'll be forced to update eventually anyway"

Given users have to respond in the same way to both, why adopt a versioning system that claims 1.12 is greater than 1.2 ?

sure it looks weird if you omit the patch part of semver. However, if you think that 2 > 12, perhaps, you're not the target audience for versions in general. /s

I've seen bugs caused by a tool not knowing that version `1.12` < `1.20` :/ so yeah, some professional developers don't know that.

Windows 95 reported it's version as 3.95 instead of 4.00 for this exact reason [0]. Apparently, writing lexicographical ordering on tuples is surprisingly unintuitive:

    bool operator<=(version lhs, version rhs) {
        return (lhs.Major <= rhs.Major) || (lhs.Minor <= rhs.Minor) || (lhs.Patch <= rhs.Patch);
    }

looks correct for anyone who have never wrote such comparison before, but of course it's wrong. The correct one is

    bool operator<=(version lhs, version rhs) {
        return (lhs.Major < rhs.Major)
               || ((lhs.Major == rhs.Major) && ((lhs.Minor < rhs.Minor)
                   || ((lhs.Minor == rhs.Minor) && (lhs.Patch <= rhs.Patch))));
    }

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040213-00/?p=40...

Your second code is wrong. For lhs = "4.3.7" and rhs = "3.3.7", your code will give true. It should be false.

Uh, no it won't?

    cat >test_ver.cpp << EOF
    #include <cstdio>
    
    struct version {
        int Major;
        int Minor;
        int Patch;
    
        version(int major, int minor, int patch)
            : Major(major)
            , Minor(minor)
            , Patch(patch)
        { }
    };
    
    bool operator<=(version lhs, version rhs) {
        return (lhs.Major < rhs.Major)
            || ((lhs.Major == rhs.Major) && ((lhs.Minor < rhs.Minor)
                    || ((lhs.Minor == rhs.Minor) && (lhs.Patch <= rhs.Patch))));
    }
    
    int main(int argc, char **argv) {
        version lhs(4, 3, 7);
        version rhs(3, 3, 7);
    
        printf("lhs <= rhs? %s\n", lhs <= rhs ? "true" : "false");
    }
    EOF

    g++ test_ver.cpp -o test_ver && ./test_ver

prints

    lhs <= rhs? false

No, it works. It's just non-obvious that it does due to the reliance on 4 levels of braces.

It is equivalent to the following:

    lhs.Major < rhs.Major
    or (lhs.Major == rhs.Major and lhs.Minor < rhs.Minor)
    or (lhs.Major == rhs.Major and lhs.Minor == rhs.Minor and lhs.Patch <= rhs.Patch)

Deduplicating (lhs.Major == rhs.Major) decreased readability enough to be confusing.

There is so many ways to write this comparison that after a couple of times you really wish there were something in the standard library to help you so that you could write e.g.

    bool operator<=(version lhs, version rhs) {
        return std::tie(lhs.Major, lhs.Minor, lhs.Patch) <= std::tie(rhs.Major, rhs.Minor, rhs.Patch);
    }

Wait, there is! And Python has something like this too, even more laconic: you don't need to write "std::tie", naked parentheses are enough.

And Microsoft jumped from Windows 8.1 to 10 to avoid breaking applications they assume “first digit is 9 means Windows 9x”. And possibly to catch up with Mac OS X 10.x.

1v12 is greater than 1v2. The issue is the "." looks like a radix point, so people think they're decimal numbers. Pick some other separator and that confusion goes away (don't use ",", since that's a radix point for many languages).

Usually there's a 3rd type (patch versions):

"This update fixes important bugs and will almost certain work if the previous version did"

...but you should test anyway in case we've introduced a regression or you depend on behaviour we've decided was a bug.

Unless you depend on the bug, which you might not consider a bug for your use case.

I don't mind Chrome's versioning / release schedule; for the past decade that it's been out, I've never noticed an update beyond the small / incremental redesigns every couple of years (like rounding tabs, dark theme support). Nothing ever broke. Nothing was ever added as an obvious feature or annoyance.

edit because I feel like I have to: this describes my experience, it may not be fact, your experience may differ, etc.

That was actually an explicit goal. We knew that if we were going to update that frequently:

- the changes had to be small (and would be by nature of so close together) - we had to be very very careful about backwards incompat changes (either to the UI or the APIs).

Firefox too. The rapid version numbers in web browsers are a nice contrast to the days of "forever IE6" comparability. Web compatibility back then was a nightmare.

Of course we're on the opposite end of that today, where two major browser engines are Chrome and WebKit(Safari), with Gecko often an afterthought.

Firefox adopted rapid version numbers basically because the rest of the browsers did. For years Firefox was on 3.something, and they'd get questions from people saying things like "Microsoft is already on Internet 7, when are you going to support Internet 7?" If I recall right, Firefox skipped versions 5 and 6, and starting with 7 they decided to use a rapid version number scheme and deemphasize version numbers in their marketing.

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