Proposed updates to Java product versioning policy

[Ian Young]

> On 29 May 2015, at 19:02, Cantor, Scott <cantor.2 at osu.edu> wrote:
> 
> Please review and raise any concerns on the list, or identify anything you still think is overlooked.
> 
> Of course, if you think we should abandon the "compatibility over everything" model that this is maintaining, that's fine. I wasn't intending to change the policy, just clarify it and extend it to cover the questions.

I looked at this today, and I think it's a big step towards clarifying things. We may even be able to have a few less versioning discussions in the dev meetings as a result.

The thing that has always irked me most about the general model is indeed the third party library stability part. I think adding the rationale for that is a big help, even if I still feel that to some extent we're playing things more cautiously than we need to in some cases (e.g., Spring patch releases). I'd suggest adding a reference to the third party library section from the second bullet in the Patch Version Compatibility section. It may also be worth thinking about whether we might make exceptions for some projects that have taken the semantic versioning pledge, although I can see that might be hard to explain.

In the Major Version Compatibility section, we're using the word "edit" where we use "upgrade" in the other sections. We should probably be consistent.

    -- Ian




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