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@asgs it does remind me of the classic "hey we've had too many patch versions, it's in the triple digits. Just go ahead and mark your next change as minor, thanks"
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@Jifuna we thought about it, but then we thought "what happens if they think the version had been downgraded when we return a much smaller number?"
commits are basically a timed random increment that returns a nearly-always increasing number, so it will do fine. -
@JsonBoa that is a lot of effort for bullshit. Hope you had fun with it.
If not I heard that fractals are also fun.
Version names are also always an option for randomness. naughty-narwall, seedy-salamander that sort of thing. -
@hjk101 bullshit-reuse, HR already wanted us to somehow export the number of commits to their dashboards so they could "track our development speed" in another misguided attempt at being relevant.
Thus we already had the "commit count" column in the "stupid jobs" table of the "bullshit" database.
It was fairly simple to output it in a /API/bullshit/version endpoint.
That being said, version names are fine when you make new releases or something, but the point is, *we do not have clear version milestones*. We mostly have a cacophony of microservices and loosely-coupled data jobs feeding hundreds of tables, each on its own update schedule.
Thus asking for a global version name is akin to asking to name the state of "the Google web index" - it barely lasts a few minutes and means nothing.
But just because something doesn't mean anything, doesn't mean it is not a required field in some stupid form.
- WE NEED TO KNOW THE VERSION OF THE SYSTEM THIS INSTANT!
"what? version? wtf are you talking about"
- THE CLIENT HAS I.T. GUIDELINES TO STRICT CONTROL THE VERSION OF EACH SOFTWARE VENDOR'S SYSTEMS!
"We are not a 'software vendor', we provide them consulting on logistics!"
- THEY USE OUR WEBSITE! THIS MAKES US A SOFTWARE VENDOR!
"Wouldn't that make 'google' their vendor too?"
- IM SURE THEY STRICTLY CONTROL GOOGLE'S VERSION TOO!
"I'm pretty sure they don't. But, whatever, that do answers the question of what they want. Some paperwork jockey wants a meaningless number to fill a form, let's give'em one"
I just had someone make an API endpoint where they can ask "the version", and it is just the number of commits in our production branch. For lols, we even 0-fill and split every three magnitude orders with a dot, so we're in version 0.012.345 or something.
Major version upgrade every million commits!
Fuck those guideline-parrots who are unaware that words sometimes have meaning, and sometimes not.
rant