The Gentoo Perl versioning scheme

Well, for sure it's a mistake to naively expect _anything_ from Perl, of all languages!

I mean, even v-strings themselves ... despite being called version strings, they're different from `version` objects/declarations, and can be used in ways I expect most non-Perl devs might consider unexpected, for example if you run this:

     perl -C2 -E 'say v102.111.111, v128513'

Not a huge fan, except in situations mentioned in "When to use calver" from your link. However... I'm sure we can all agree that anything is better than the Mozilla/Google "major versions are now minor" arms race, that are now up to absurd numbers. Except for projects using code names. Is Wonky Wallaby more recent than Halfbaked Hamster? Fuck knows. Debian has been especially annoying with this, since the last three releases were b-words: buster, bullseye, bookworm. I can never remember. Please stop.

I see where you are coming from.

I would check what GNU's vercmp and Arch's vercmp would say, but I have no access to them right now.

Ireland, Malta, and Cypress use the Euro as their currency but use dot as their decimal separator so without further context €50.000 is ambiguous.

Probably the best way to handle this is the way SI recommends dot vs comma be handled in scientific and technical writing. Their recommendation is to use a thin space for grouping, so if you see a dot or comma it is the decimal separator.

€50.000 and €50,000 would then both be exactly €50. If you meant €50000 and wanted to separate the thousands you would would write €50 000 (which looks ugly on HN because HN turns thin space into regular space).

Update: actually, SI used to recommend thin space. Now they just say space without saying what kind of space. Some people recommend choosing narrow non-breaking space (U+202F) (which HN also turns into regular space).

Also, for 4 digit numbers before the decimal they recommend not separating them, so 5k Euros would be €5000 not €5 000.

I need to make an urgent call to my accountant.

50.000 EUR is exactly 50 EUR, though. 50,000 EUR is not.

For the record, before you down-vote, check the other comments. I am from an European country where we "officially" use "," as the decimal point (so yes, I know it might not be universally true, at least not in theory), yet my bank uses ".", and so do people (many, at least). In IT, it always has been ".", too. Of course in elementary school (>20 years ago) we used "," as the decimal point, FWIW. :P It might still be the practice there.

Windows has always had its own versioning conventions: historically it was a one-digit major and a two-digit minor, so windows 2.1 was 2.10 in full (its predecessor was 2.03, and it was followed by 2.11), and NT 3.5 was followed by NT 3.51.

This scheme was moved away from with Windows 10, which switched to a year/month versioning scheme (so the first W10 update was version 1511, as it was released in November 2015), then to the current "halves" system.

There was also a minor upgrade to Windows 3.1 called Windows 3.11, which further reinforces your point.

Perl is much better at text processing than Python. I reach straight for Perl when solutions using grep, sed, awk, cut and tr gets weird. And I'm saying this as someone with two decades of experience in Python and next to nothing about Perl.

Viznut uses perl to build the fonts from source in Unscii.

* https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/tree/2.1.1f

Yup. We still do (at DuckDuckGo), though now also alongside a bunch of other languages.

Same as wow. It makes more sense like this. Maybe the issue is that some interpret what look like decimal numbers but are not decimal numbers as decimal numbers.

Am I parsing this right? Are we adding a place to the version number to denote 'this change is in the 2s'?

So we went from v0 to v10, then to v11, then v15, and so on?

> To make matters interesting, a leading v on a Perl version, or the presence of 2 or more .'s imply a sort order closer to Gentoos.

This is 100% classic perl: the default is bonkers and unintuitive, but the behaviour also changes in a DWIM manner to throw people off. And of course there are two different ways to represent versions so simply forgetting the v (one character) can cause a litany of bugs.

It's so ungoogleable.

they don't know why, they only know spewing drive-by perl hate is easy upvote fodder for midwits who can't think of anything reasonable to contribute

The cryptography package is very popular, but "critical to virtually every Python project on Earth" is massive overstatement. It's not even in the top 20 most downloaded from PyPI (https://pypistats.org/top). I've never used it, while I've used Numpy many times.

The new scheme is fine. They are correct to describe it as semver-compatible — they assess that every time they add functionality it is backwards-incompatible, and their backwards-compatible changes are inherently just bugfixes. And they are correct that Firefox version numbers have been doing the same thing, and thus their way is not unique.

The old cryptography version numbers were not "floating point numbers" (as demonstrated by the fact that they often had two decimal points). They were just incorrectly using the major and minor parts of a version number to communicate what changed between releases. They weren't doing anything like expecting version 1.11 to be treated as older than version 1.2. I can't fathom how this is supposed to have broken CI pipelines.