search

thefakequake / pypartpicker

A Python package that can be used to fetch information from PCPartPicker on products and parts lists.
MIT License
18 stars 8 forks source link

Incorporate a Versioning Standard #4

Closed lukadd16 closed 3 years ago

lukadd16 commented 3 years ago

Consider using a versioning standard so as to make clear to your user-base if a new release merely addresses bug fixes, adds new features or if it introduces breaking changes.

I personally suggest using the Semantic Versioning (SemVer) specification as it is widely used by the open source community and thus can be easily understood by any and all who may want to use/are already using your software. Being a specification it has certain set rules, which is a good thing as it leaves no opportunity for ambiguity.

The full spec is linked above (which I suggest you read), but in short SemVer specifies version numbers with three numerical components called MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH (ex: 1.2.1).

Take the latest release v1.7 for example. This release bumped the package version from 1.6 to 1.7 as a result of commit e4f899ee1b7b51992d9f809a693a2298d7ae358c. Looking into the nature of this commit reveals it was simply a bug fix, yet in terms of Semantic Versioning you bumped the MINOR version. This gave me a false impression as to what the new release was addressing (and is also what motivated me to open this issue). I guess the point I'm trying to make is that adherence to a standard like SemVer is important for packages/softwares that are dependent on pypartpicker since a version number alone can tell a lot. In production, I may be more inclined to update to new releases that only bump PATCH rather than ones that bump MINOR and MAJOR since I know PATCHes won't break my code.

This last bit is out of scope for this issue but in tandem with SemVer I also like to use the Release Please GitHub action which automatically generates GitHub releases depending on what type of commits you make...but that's a discussion for another day (one which I'd be happy to have).

thefakequake commented 3 years ago

I'll incorporate this into future releases, thanks for letting me know about this. I'm really not great with this package stuff haha.