The cargo cult of versioning
The point about renaming major versions is baffling. First of all, if your suggestion is that you use Rails 4 vs. Rails 5, that&#x27;s a version number, one that may be handled a little differently by your package manager (or it may not, if you already pin to major versions).<p>But the premise that a major version conveys no more information than a full rename is simply wrong. Is <i>libfoo n + 1</i> more similar to <i>libfoo n</i>, or <i>libbaz m</i>? In extremely rare cases, it will be more similar to <i>libbaz m</i> than <i>libfoo n</i>, but in 99% of cases, that&#x27;s not true. Even if that is not perfectly reliable, that probability conveys information.<p>P.S. I&#x27;m not commenting on the other ideas raised by the article.