[jakarta.ee-spec] Major vs minor version update for the Plan Reviews

["Kevin Sutter" <sutter@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,
As I either mentor
or review the Plan Reviews for the upcoming Jakarta Specifications, I am
questioning some of the major version updates.  Per semantic
versioning,
we should be limiting the major version update for breaking API changes
-- not just because we have "too many changes for a minor release".

I will be challenging
all of these that I see, but I also ask the rest of the Spec Committee
to also help monitor this situation.  In the EFSPwe determined that we would encourage the use semantic versioning for the
individual Specifications, but we couldn't require it.  (The Platform
and Profile versions could be an exception to the rule.)

One example that
I came across is the JSONB 3.0 Plan Review:
https://github.com/jakartaee/specifications/pull/348

Although the author
did an excellent job of highlighting the changes proposed for this release,
I didn't see anything that caused an incompatible change.  Thus, I
am challenging the use of a major version update to 3.0 instead of just
increasing the minor version to 2.x.  At the end of the day, each
Spec Project can decide for themselves, but we should encourage semantic
behavior for APIs.

I'm going to post
this to the public Spec mailing list since it was a wider audience and
this discussion/observation shouldn't be limited to just the Spec Committee
(imho).  Thanks!

---------------------------------------------------
Kevin Sutter 
STSM, Jakarta EE and MicroProfile architect @ IBM
e-mail:  sutter@xxxxxxxxxx     Twitter:  @kwsutter
phone: tl-553-3620 (office), 507-253-3620 (office)    
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinwsutter

Part-time schedule: Tue, Wed, Thu (off on Mon and Fri)