Commenter here. Firstly my comments are designed to highlight confusion in your argument, or with your understanding of versioning as a whole. With regard to version identifiers, they aren’t simply strings, they are complex data types made up of iterable data types. Even a custom enumeration that holds values such as “alpha”, “beta”, “rc”, isnt just a string, but an enumerated type, meant to convey MEANING. The fact that they are serialised into a format that happens to be readable and parsable, is besides the point. You write “Let's just make them a tuple. Instead of "3.0.2", we'll say "(3, 0, 2)".” Why bother? You’ll end up treating them the exact same way. Or does the tuple have some structure that is different from the containment found in semver? Semver is a heirarchy. And what would it mean? Absolutely nothing if you were hoping to understand the difference between 2 versions simply marked like “Product-1 21” the “Product-2 13”. If you think every open source developer’s life is going get easier with strings that hold no meaning, you are sorely mistaken. I’m truly baffled by your reasoning. Others have commented, and I agree, after 20 years in the industry, pinning is vital. The Go community isn’t wrong. The request to pin is borne of experience. You are ignoring the fact that working with multiple dependency’s that are produced by coders you have no control over isn’t all rainbows & unicorns.
Ok, thanks for trying but I think we're talking past each other. I feel pretty confident that I'm not just ignoring 20 years in the industry. (I've spent 20 years in the industry.) If I'm missing something it's subtle and I don't think you're anywhere near it. So I'll stop engaging here.
m.nn.pp-alpha-rc0 may convey meaning to the author, but it is meaningless to users because the 'alpha' and 'rc0' mean different things in different libraries, based on their release processes.
You have spent more sentences on my tuple idea than I spent introducing then completely emptying it. That suggests that I have failed to convey my larger point to you. I'm going to agree to disagree and move on.
> m.nn.pp-alpha-rc0 may convey meaning to the author, but it is meaningless to users because the 'alpha' and 'rc0' mean different things in different libraries, based on their release processes
I don't think you are using the word "meaningless" correctly. rc0 may not mean exactly the same thing in different software packages, but it always means the first release candidate. Thus, it is not meaningless - it conveys meaning. And if the user wants, they can look up that software package, and find out exactly what rc0 means, gaining even more meaning from the description. Perhaps you are trying to say that rc0 doesn't convey as much information as quickly as the alternative you are proposing?
