I feel spoiled having most of my experience in js, react and node. They like, try really hard not to totally break shit.
This type of library API breaking change on a minor version update basically never happens.
And if it can happen in ruby land, it can happen in JS land too.
Literally happens all the time with Rails. To the point they decided to call their versioning schema “shifted semver” to afford themselves API changes on minor versions: https://guides.rubyonrails.org/maintenance_policy.html
Good luck if you are using Rails and ecosystem and you expect any sort of sensible versioning.
First I get that people are used to SemVer, but it is unreasonable to assume all projects follow it. And yes in semver terms, you can simply assume that Rails X.Y is a major release.
Then, any breaking change in Rails must first emit deprecation warnings, so unless you are jumping one version, this kind of scenario shouldn't happen with Rails itself.
Also note that Ruby (MRI) itself more or less behave the same regarding versioning, deprecations and breaking changes. First emit warnings, then break.
The language and framework, by your own statement, are pushing breaking changes at a yearly rate. That’s a horrible developer experience.
> pushing breaking changes at a yearly rate. That’s a horrible developer experience.
That's your opinion. I much prefer these bite sized yearly changes to much bigger changes over longer periods. e.g. Ruby with this strategy never had the big divide Python 3 had with its much larger change.
You may not need to be confrontational...
> there are other ways of versioning software
I'm sure there is. But some features and other improvements sometimes require to deprecate and remove some older features.
Each project will chose its own tradeoff between bringing the improvement faster vs keeping compatibility longer.
Are packages that don't follow semver allowed to be released?
Haskell asks for PVP for example.
And even with very strict typing, the breaking change showcased in the article wouldn't have been caught, the API stayed the same, it just behave differently. Not every backward incompatible change is as simple as a function signature change.
I really don't think this is a scalable approach and was really surprised that someone took the time to check my dependencies personally. My experience may just be rare.
I meant more on the human side than automated. Haskell doesn't have that much to do with formal verification in usual use. I'm not sure what the best policy for a good yet vibrant package ecosystem is.