For example in the new ASP.NET Core / EntityFrameworkCore as well as Angular, the minor version bumps happen on a very frequent base.

In case of ASP.NET Core, the target is to have roughly 1 major release per year and a minor version pump once every 3-4 months. There is already a Tag which in my eyes makes no sense, the changes between ASP.NET Core 1.0 and 1.1 are small enough to still be mainly compatible with the major version.

I'd be okay with only having tags for major versions, but minor versions may be to noisy and cause big fragmenting in the questions, especially for people who are monitoring a certain tag it becomes difficult to track every single minor version.

I'd like to get the minor tags added as synonyms to the major version or maybe even removed completely as its suitable enough of the person states in the question which minor version they are using.

Currently there are already 14 questions for asp.net-core-1.1.

  • Related question. I support synonymizing but I'm not really active in this tag. – Glorfindel Dec 3 '16 at 14:12
  • 2
    I find those as unnecessary balkanization of the community. – Braiam Dec 3 '16 at 14:45
  • 1
    balkanization means 'divide (a region or body) into smaller mutually hostile states or groups.' – TankorSmash Dec 5 '16 at 20:19

This question highly depends upon the definition of minor version. For example, in Ruby 1.9 is a minor version of 1, but the differences between 1.8 and 1.9 are huge. On the other end of the spectrum, there are major versions of things that I think do not need their on tag. Firefox has put out 7 major versions this year. As there is not a consistent timeline from language-to-language and product-to-product about minor/major version releases, I think that it should be a case-by-case basis.

  • Is Ruby 1.9 relevant anymore? Is not even in the downloads page ruby-lang.org/en/downloads and I think that any issue of 1.9 coming from code in 1.x, will need the knowledge of 1.x and 1.9, so having a single tag for both seems sensible. – Braiam Dec 3 '16 at 23:35
  • 1
    @Braiam Ruby 1.9.3 is probably still the most widely used version of Ruby. – Eli Sadoff Dec 3 '16 at 23:36
  • @Braiam That's not really true. I can solve a fair number of problems in Ruby ≥1.9, but anything before 1.9 is not as easy for me. A lot of syntactical changes where introduced in 1.9 and a lot of methods were introduced. Additionally, 1.9 introduced BasicObject which is a parent class for Object. – Eli Sadoff Dec 3 '16 at 23:38
  • @Braiam I think Ruby was cited as an example, Oracle/Sun marketing people call it Java 8, but java -version shows 1.8. TeX (as another example) is currently at version 3.14159265 – Elliott Frisch Dec 3 '16 at 23:38
  • "Ruby 1.9.3 is probably still the most widely used version of Ruby" then <1.8 are irrelevant. – Braiam Dec 3 '16 at 23:40
  • 2
    @Braiam That's not true either. Java 6 is widely used, but that doesn't mean that there is no merit to questions about versions of Java pre-6. – Eli Sadoff Dec 3 '16 at 23:41
  • "Java 6 is widely used"? You know that java is ridden with tons of security issues and they are constantly fixing them? Is that not reason enough for the entire community to push forward, instead of dragging its feet? – Braiam Dec 3 '16 at 23:45
  • Considering Java was built on Forward Compatibility, it is likely that older versions will always be relevant. – Eli Sadoff Dec 3 '16 at 23:47
  • Oh, btw, java is planning to fix the version scheme once and for all, it was crazy. Uh? What has to do that it's forward compatible with EOL versions being relevant? If you find any bug on your java code, and submit a bug report, the first thing you will be told is to stop screwing with EOL versions and use the latest instead for your program. – Braiam Dec 3 '16 at 23:59
  • Regardless, my point was that for the specific case of asp.net-core-1.1 this is alright, but I think that minor version tags should stay for certain languages. – Eli Sadoff Dec 4 '16 at 0:03

Should we really support tags for minor versions?

Lets see what the help center says:




Are minor versions stuff that nobody asked about? Doubt it. In fact, is more likely that people that already answered questions asked about prior versions to also answer questions asked about current ones.

In fact, if you use new tags you are effectively preventing established users from finding your new question ever on their home page (SO tag engine works under the assumption that X and X-1 are as different as a rocket and love). So, creating new tags for x-version.whatever tends to be less likely to be answered since they have no followers, and therefore should be avoided at all costs.

  • If that's the only one of the language tags you use, then I would agree. However, as Eli's answer pointed out, there are some occasions where minor versions have introduced major new functionality. – krillgar Dec 5 '16 at 15:38
  • @krillgar functionally changes aren't reason enough to create tags. That was something, someone invented later. When tags were introduced the only functionality was "connect questions with the people that are able to answer them", and if you see how the system treats tags, you will discover that everything works around this assumption. – Braiam Dec 5 '16 at 15:56

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .