Use-cases for version ranges?

[Stuart McCulloch]

On 20 Nov 2011, at 16:53, cowwoc wrote:

> Stuart McCulloch wrote:
>> 
>> On 20 Nov 2011, at 03:09, cowwoc wrote:
>>> The upside of this approach is that the author of B is in a better
>>> position to declare compatibility than the author of A. The author of A
>>> still only needs to test a single version. What do you think?
>> 
>> You might want to read the Multiple Versions section from this entry on
>> Peter's blog [3] where he raises the question of whether the importer or
>> exporter is best placed to express compatibility.  This later blog entry
>> [4] about versioning is also worthwhile reading.
>> 
> 
> He seems to agree with my point "the exporter of a package knows exactly to
> which version he is compatible, being the responsible person for that
> package [...] The importer is almost always guessing."

Yes it wasn't meant as a counter-point, just an FYI that there's some interesting discussions around this topic in the OSGi archives.

> Stuart McCulloch wrote:
>> 
>> PS. while most people use a single version for Maven dependencies, you can
>> in fact use version ranges to restrict the resolution process [5].
>> Microsoft also decided to use ranges in their NuGet package system [6].
>> 
>> [1] http://semver.org/
>> [2] http://www.osgi.org/wiki/uploads/Links/SemanticVersioning.pdf
>> [3] http://www.osgi.org/blog/2008/02/research-challenges-for-osgi.html
>> [4] http://www.osgi.org/blog/2009/12/versions.html
>> [5]
>> http://docs.codehaus.org/display/MAVEN/Dependency+Mediation+and+Conflict+Resolution#DependencyMediationandConflictResolution-DependencyVersionRanges
>> [6] http://docs.nuget.org/docs/reference/version-range-specification
>> 
> 
> Nice. I didn't know that.
> 
> Thanks,
> Gili
> 
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