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Just as rails has added the asset pipeline in a minor number patch. Or as ruby changed to unicode with 1.9. Or as python added a whole new syntax for exceptions with 2.6. As with many other languages, incrementing the minor number usually means quite big changes while more or less keeping backwards compatibility.

Changing the major number is something that's done when backwards-compatibility is hugely affected.

The exception is probably ruby which greatly broke backwards-compatibility with 1.9 (unicode) and mostly just changed internals with 2.0



Oh, I'm not about to hold up ruby or python as shining beacons here--though I will smugly admit that the rubyists seem to be pretty fast at updating their gems.

Still, it's weird practice nonetheless, right?


Actually, I think it's fine for languages:

Backwards-Incompatible change? Increment Major version

Many new features, but (largely) backwards compatible? Increment Minor version.

Bugfixes? Increment Patch.

I think this also perfectly maps to Semantic Versioning (http://semver.org/)


>Still, it's weird practice nonetheless, right?

No, it depends on the versioning number scheme. Not all schemes mean the same thing with major/minor/minorer.




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