More reliable versioning

The WordPress core team is working on making auto-update of plugins more mainstream and accessible. At the same time, projects that allow site maintainers to leverage tools like Composer to manage WordPress plugins as PHP dependencies are also maturing. These allow folks to upgrade dependencies according to some kind of plan.

Yoast’s versioning semantics don’t currently adhere to any sort of accepted rule, as far as I can tell. It’s simply “minor” release 0-9 and onto the next “major” release. So 12.0 – 12.9 and then 13.0.

This isn’t very helpful to anyone who might be trying to schedule updates or configure auto-updates. With something like semver, we can assume in X.Y.Z that Z is safe to update automatically – should be bug fixes, performance improvements. Even Y should be fine, introducing new features but keeping everything else in place. Then X is where things get scary – breaking BC in some way.

I’d love to see Yoast adopt something like semver or another predictable versioning methodology so that site maintainers can more reliably plan updates.

• This topic was modified 4 years, 9 months ago by eclev91.