Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Debian used to manage and package programs from the real world.

It is obviously easier to create breaking changes that will not be discovered in dynamic languages. But in the real world, where everybody do unit tests, it is difficult to understand what kind of new problems were not already encountered 20 years ago.




Well Rust and npm happened in that time.

I don't have much experience with the latter but I know of the former that despite promises of semantic versioning, it is quite common for a crate to not work with a newer version, requiring one to hard depend on a specific version.

Add to that that Rust's definition of “non-breaking change” in theory can include changes that A) read to compilation errors or B) compile fine but lead to different behavior.




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2025 batch! Applications are open till May 13

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: