alt Hacker News> Because updates don't just include new features but also bug and security fixes.
This practice needs to change, although it will be almost impossible to get a whole ecosystem to adopt. You shouldn’t have to take new features (and associated new problems) just to get bug fixes and security updates. They should be offered in parallel. We need to get comfortable again with parallel maintenance branches for each major feature branch, and comfortable with backporting fixes to older releases.
Replies
tshaddox • yesterday at 5:19 PM
Are you just referring to backporting?
nine_k • yesterday at 4:35 PM
Semver was invented to facilitate that. Only if everyone adhered to it.
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I maintain both commercial and open source libs. This is a non starter in both cases. It would easily double if not triple the workload.
For open source, well these are volunteer projects on my own time, you are always welcome to fork a given version and backport any fixes that land on main/master.
For commercial libs, our users are not willing to pay extra for this service, so we don't provide it. They would rather stay on an old version and update the entire code base at given intervals. Even when we do release patch versions, there is surprisingly little uptake.