[CASSANDRA-5156] CQL: loosen useless versioning constraint

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Low
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 1.2.1
• Assignee: Sylvain Lebresne
• Reporter: Sylvain Lebresne

Authors

Sylvain Lebresne

• Created: 14/Jan/13 15:54
• Updated: 16/Apr/19 09:32
• Resolved: 24/Jan/13 17:30

Description

So far the CQL doc says the CQL language follows http://semver.org/. Meaning that a version is X.Y.Z where:

• X is the major version and denotes backward incompatible changes
• Y is the minor version and denotes backward compatible changes
• Z is the patch version and denotes backward and forward compatible changes, i.e. change to the implementation.

Now I don't think for CQL we have much use of the patch version. Not that knowing when implementation fixes have been done is not useful but:

1. The Cassandra version number already kind of cover that.
2. While a patch version would be more precise in that it would only concern CQL3 related changes, I have no illusion on our capacity in maintaining such patch version accuratly (and frankly, I don't blame us).

So instead of keeping a number that will end up having no usefulness whatsoever, I suggest that we either:

1. remove it and have CQL3 version being just major and minor.
2. use that latter number as a sub-minor version, i.e. a version that only
3. denotes backward compatible changes, not forward ones. We would then bump the two last digit at our discretion, to denote some form of "importance" of the changes.

I don't care much about which of the two we end up doing, but since we already have a 3 numbers version and since I kind of like the idea of having two numbers to convey a sense of importance of the changes, I'm attaching a patch for the 2nd solution.

Note that the patch removes the changes section from the doc, but that's because I think it's useless in it's current form (on top of being inaccurate). I do plan on adding a new changes section that lists changes between CQL minor version as soon as we have some of those.