I know a few teams on 2.2 that would *love* to be able to jump right to > 5.0. Once you fall far enough behind, upgrading to another version that's > already deprecated becomes paralyzing. I don't expect 2.2 compatibility > btw, just using it as an example. > > If it can be done, it would make a lot of folks very happy. >
If we could pull that off that would be great. I would like to see it happen first. A lot has already been cleaned in 4.0 that makes 3.x to 5.x now non-functioning. And the cleaner code certainly helps navigate the code base quicker. (It was agreed to keep sstable format compatible indefinitely, but that's about offline upgrading. And even the bugs that exist around frozen tuples/udts in the ma-md versions, I would suggest there's value in raising the minimum compatibility to `me`. This is an example that these breakages still do happen, hopefully less over time, and _drawing a line in the sand_ is a legit tactic to deal with them.) @Mick, you made me laugh, with your unique ability to agree disagreeably. > You might not care about marketing, but people pay more attention to major > version upgrades and "minor" ones. Even though this can be in no way be > considered a minor change. It doesn't matter what people "should" do. > Major version bump is a signal to end users that this is a BIG DEAL. > Yup! A healthy community needs to be one where it's safe to present diverse and/or unpopular points of view, without fear or concern of the initial phase of discussion stagnating :-) Bikeshedding aside, my opinion is that the signal/feedback to the operator about what they need to do is of more concrete value than the new features list to the user. Aside, it is unfortunate that we associate minor semver version numbers as "minor". They are, after all, still referred to as major releases. It is just separate terminology between releases and semver that we are tripping ourselves up over it, and our emphasis on "the number". Ideally (imho) it would be wonderful to keep semver private to us and operators, having some other mechanism to signal user-facing/marketing, like we do with sstable formats – but that's still always going to leak out in some way.
