JEP 223: New Version-String Scheme

[Iris Clark]

Hi, Remi.

Thanks for taking time to read the JEP.

>> New JEP Candidate: http://openjdk.java.net/jeps/223

> I fail to see why dropping the first 1 is interesting.
>
> While it's true than $MAJOR will be always '1', and that each release
> slightly violating the principle of semantic versioning, it see that more
> like the difference between a principle and the reality than something that
> has to be fixed. 
>
> IMO, having a difference between the marketing name and the engineering
> version value doesn't worth the trouble of the compatibility issues you
> list.

Do you have any backing data for this?  The biggest potential problem we
anticipate at this time is existing code which assumes that the initial
element is a '1' and just skips it when comparing version numbers.  At this
point, we suspect that this code is rare, but perhaps that's not correct?  Do
you know of any other significant risks that we did not list?

> And for the API, version() should be versions() and return an int[] 
> and build() should return an OptionalInt.

What is the benefit of using List/array and primitive/reference types in this
case?  Conversion between them is straight-forward.

Regards,
iris