JEP 223: New Version-String Scheme

[Remi Forax]

On 11/06/2014 12:59 AM, Iris Clark wrote:
> 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?

no, I've no more data than you.

but you ask the question the wrong way, you want to change something 
that I think doesn't need to change,
so the question is more what is the benefit of removing the first '1' 
than "we think that there will be no major oops"
so we can remove the first '1'.

>
>> 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.

What is the benefit to use a List instead of an int[] ?
The version will be loaded early in the process, if we can avoid a 
dependency on java.util.List,
I think it's a net gain.


>
> Regards,
> iris

cheers,
Rémi