Hi everyone, This is a question for anyone consuming the pom-* parents of the SciJava software stack.
We want to start versioning these POM parents according to consistent rules. (Unfortunately, right now, the approach is vague and potentially inconsistent [1].) We came up with the following two possible schemes, and would like your feedback on which one you would prefer. == 1) SemVer == Every POM parent has three digits, X.Y.Z. The X digit is "major" and when incremented indicates a breaking change of some sort: either A) plugin config changes requiring downstream changes, or more commonly B) major SemVer dependency version bumps (e.g., managed scijava-common version updated from 2.35.0 to 3.0.0). This would exclude 0.x and beta components though (so e.g. imglib2-realtransform could go from 2.0.0-beta-27 to 2.0.0-beta-28 without bumping pom-imglib2's X digit). The Y digit is "minor" and incremented when dependency versions change in a SemVer-compatible manner, or when plugin configuration is added or improved. For critical bug-fixes where a given POM parent is somehow compromised or broken, the third digit Z can be bumped before going to the next Y. (See e.g. the recent pom-fiji 5.0.Z series of releases.) == 2) Bread crumb version trail == The pom-scijava parent would have a single version digit. The pom-imagej (which is the next POM down) would have two: the first in lockstep with its pom-scijava parent, and the second being its dedicated version digit. POMs which extend pom-imagej (i.e.: pom-scifio, pom-imglib2 and pom-fiji) would have three digits: the first two in lockstep with pom-imagej and the third their own. And so on down the line—e.g., pom-trakem2 would need four digits: the first three matching the pom-fiji parent and the fourth its own. == Pros and cons == Option 1: [PRO] Semantic meaning. You can reason whether a given POM is somehow "breaking". [PRO] Succinctness. Every parent POM has at most three digits at any one time. [CON] Lack of provenance. Not obvious which parent POMs go together without leaning on a tool. Option 2: [PRO] Clear provenance. You can trivially derive the chain of parent POM versions. [CON] Lack of semantics. Harder to tell which POM parent releases might break backwards compatibility. [CON] Aesthetics. More than 3 digits in a version string may not be desirable. Note that either way, we are in the process of creating a scijava-maven-plugin goal to dump all the component version properties associated with a given parent POM. Since either scheme is consistent and useful, we want to institute whichever scheme will annoy everyone less. ;-) So which do people like better: SemVer or breadcrumbs? Thanks, Curtis [1] The 5.x POM versioning approach was an attempt to achieve _both_ options above, but Mark & I realized today that the two goals are rather mutually exclusive. That is, we cannot keep POM parent versions fully in lockstep while also maintaining a SemVer versioning scheme.
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