search

TritonDataCenter / smartos-live

For more information, please see http://smartos.org/ For any questions that aren't answered there, please join the SmartOS discussion list: https://smartos.topicbox.com/groups/smartos-discuss
1.57k stars 246 forks source link

semver / release tags? #823

Open mcandre opened 5 years ago

mcandre commented 5 years ago

Looks like SmartOS Live uses a rolling release model, with the version number taking the form of a timestamp. What do you think of introducing semantic versioning, so that users and application developers can trust in expectations around backwards compatibility in well defined version ranges?

jclulow commented 5 years ago

It's our intent with the platform to basically never make a change that would constitute a semver major roll. Zones need to be able to come up on new platform images without requiring reconfiguration or separate software update, so we're careful to be backwards compatible.

mcandre commented 5 years ago

A laudable goal!

So SmartOS will never depart from its original design?

jclulow commented 5 years ago

So SmartOS will never depart from its original design?

Past performance obviously doesn't guarantee future results, but that's the intent. The whole deployment model is structured around being able to swap out the platform ramdisk with a newer build, thus getting fixes and improvements, without materially affecting the zones in the ZFS pool.

It's conceivable that we might build something fundamentally incompatible in the future, but I think such a radical departure from the core design principles of the project would require, at a minimum, a new name and a new release train; effectively a new project.