[Cython] Cython 0.29 – or 29.0 ?

[Erik Bray]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2018 at 12:03 PM Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml at behnel.de> wrote:
>
> Robert Bradshaw schrieb am 16.08.2018 um 00:48:
> > If we're going to ditch the 0.x, I'd go for 1.0 as well. I'm a huge fan of
> > semantic versioning.
>
> I'm ok with it, just fear that it might become excessive for Cython (ok,
> I'm the one who proposed jumping to 29.0, but...). Basically, any time we
> add something to Includes/ or anything to the language, we'd have to
> increase the minor version, and any time we fix something that might break
> some person's code, we'd have to increase the major version? Some changes
> are simply not important enough to merit shouting out the breakage that
> almost no-one would otherwise notice. And unless we're adding new syntax
> that was an error before, almost any change in the compiler bears a tiny
> risk of breaking something for someone.

I believe it's okay to make sensical judgment calls on this one.  I
don't really like how semver.org defines usage of the major version
number, because one could easily take it too literally like this.  I
believe there are other reasons to bump major version numbers, such as
yes, marketing.  You can also use it like Linux and some other
projects do to indicate LTS.  Like, an odd version number means "we
guarantee not to signficantly break anything in these releases, and to
backport bug fixes for X amount of time", versus even major version
means "active changes are happening here; API may move around a bit;
no bug fixes to these releases after the next LTS release".

I'm not saying Cython should necessarily do that.  Just giving
examples of how I think semver.org's definition of major version is
too constrained.