jashkenas

Spurred by recent events (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8244700), this is a quick set of jotted-down thoughts about the state of "Semantic" Versioning, and why we should be fighting the good fight against it.

For a long time in the history of software, version numbers indicated the relative progress and change in a given piece of software. A major release (1.x.x) was major, a minor release (x.1.x) was minor, and a patch release was just a small patch. You could evaluate a given piece of software by name + version, and get a feeling for how far away version 2.0.1 was from version 2.8.0.

But Semantic Versioning (henceforth, SemVer), as specified at http://semver.org/, changes this to prioritize a mechanistic understanding of a codebase over a human one. Any "breaking" change to the software must be accompanied with a new major version number. It's alright for robots, but bad for us.

SemVer tries to compress a huge amount of information — the nature of the change, the percentage of users that wil

mikeflynn

// ==UserScript==
// @name "STLToday Free"
// @version 2.2
// @description "A user script to automatically bypass the paywall by marking the content as free."
// @match http://*.stltoday.com/*
// @run-at document-start
// ==/UserScript==

function updateMetaTag() {
  var m = document.getElementsByTagName('meta');

bgallagh3r

#!/bin/bash -e
clear
echo "============================================"
echo "WordPress Install Script"
echo "============================================"
echo "Database Name: "
read -e dbname
echo "Database User: "
read -e dbuser
echo "Database Password: "