Another 3rd-party version policy question

[Tom Zeller]

Mostly Scott,

I guess I’m wondering why the version policy considers “any” 3rd-party library to be part of the public API and if that’s worth reconsidering.

While updating spymemcache and hibernate-entitymanager, I wondered if 3rd-party dependencies of impl projects should be versioned the same as dependencies of api projects. While versioning strictly very much seems like the right thing to do, I also wonder if that would technically result in a major version bump because we want to take advantage of a new feature of a 3rd-party impl dependency which also happens to not follow our version policy (i.e. both adds and removes a method). I guess we could just note such a deviation from the policy in our release notes, but the general question is interesting to me.

Thanks !