[Cuis] Compatability and Version

[Ken Dickey]

Greetings,

While we are discussing package dependencies, I thought to bring up an old concept: Compatibility Numbers.

The basic idea is that one updates a version number with each release, but one only increments a compatibility number when there is an INcompatible change to an API.

Software can know the past (and deal with it) but not the future. Checking  compatibility of required package dependencies is a quick and cheap sanity check.  If the compatibility number of a package is higher than some software knows about, then it can pop up a warning or take some other action.

While I don't really want to introduce version numbers for packages, I do like compatibility numbers.

Does this sound like overkill or a useful convention?

$0.02,
-KenD