Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

"J. Lewis Muir via Tech-talk" <[email protected]> · Thu, 9 Jan 2020 12:07:41 -0600

On 01/09, J. Lewis Muir wrote:
> On 01/09, Ralph Lange via Tech-talk wrote:
> > Are you really calling for the EPICS distribution version to do a <major>
> > jump whenever any of its modules does an incompatible API change?
> 
> If you're asking whether I'm really calling for the major version of
> EPICS to be incremented when any of the Git submodules breaks API or ABI
> compatibility, then my answer is yes.
> 
> If you're saying that EPICS 7.0 and future release series are
> essentially a software collection, then I think that's a big change
> compared to all the previous EPICS series.  In that case, if EPICS 7.0
> and beyond are just a software collection (kind of like synApps is for
> what I have been calling EPICS modules), then I would say that if it's
> a package, then yes, I would still wish for it to adhere to semantic
> versioning.  That would make it very clear when API and ABI backward
> compatibility is being broken.  If the packages in the collection are
> breaking API and ABI backward compatibility left and right, then yes,
> the collection package is going to end up incrementing its major version
> number all the time too.

To be clear, I'm wishing for an EPICS 7.0 (and future) major version
bump whenever a new version of EPICS is released that either breaks API
or ABI backward compatibility itself (i.e., in the source code that
is currently in the epics-base repo and is not in a Git submodule)
or will contain a Git submodule that has broken API or ABI backward
compatibility, not a major version bump for each Git submodule that
breaks API or ABI backward compatibility.  In other words, after any Git
submodule breaks backward compatibility, any others could break backward
compatibility too before the next EPICS release and "ride the bump," and
the next EPICS release would have a major version that is still just one
more than the major version of the previous EPICS release.

Lewis

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System