Obviously, BS does not follow semver. Looked like it a bit before but now ... Anyhow, this imho makes it even more difficult to handle.
Topic on Talk:BlueSpice
Hmm. What do you mean? The versioning of BlueSpice is in itself SemVer. Do you mean individual extensions?
4.3 breaks compatibility with MW 1.35; thus, it should be 5.0, no?
When compatibility with MW 1.31 was dropped, the version changed from 3.x to 4.x. Same for MW 1.27 with 2.x to 3.x. This is why I figured that BS somehow followed Semver. This new version change does not look like it at all to me.
Ultimately, this is not a big deal for me, but one needs to be careful here, I guess.
Hi!
You are right, raising the MediaWiki core requirements in the latest release of BlueSpice would have qualified for a major version bump in order to comply to SemVer.
You might have noticed that the BlueSpice team has started to publish new extensions without the "BlueSpice" prefix (e.g. Extension:Workflows, Extension:StandardDialogs, Extension:EnhancedUpload, ...). With those extensions, we did exactly what you would expect: we made a major release based on and compatible to 1.39. This is how it should be.
Now with the "BlueSpice"-prefixed extensions, it is a little bit different. Historically we currently align their versions with the version of the overall distribution. We have discussed internally whether or not to make a major release out of this, but ultimately decided not to do so. Mainly because we release them bundled with MediaWiki itself as a distribution. I agree that this problematic for people using those extensions outside the distribution.
I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this decision may have caused. Our goal is to come to a more flexible and "extension individual" release strategy in the future. But things take time. Processes need to be adapted, tools chains and workflows to be created. There are already plans to decouple individual extension versions from the distribution version.
Thanks a bunch for elaborating. This helps grokking your approach.
Indeed, not using the officially published BlueSpice Free suite is probably a fairly uncommon path for people. In this situation, taking care of dependencies is on me as the end user. Also, versioning is not as important in this situation, and other aspects like marketing may prevail if you consider them.
There is no need to apologize. It is a decision you take as a creator, and still, people appreciate using your software, even if it is a bit more effort for the system administrator. :)
In the end, I think SemVer is a pretty good approach. Thus, following it is probably a good idea. Good to see it in place for the newly published and decoupled extensions. Thanks also for publishing them in the first place.
Anyhow, the future will show for the rest.