What's in a version number? (Or: Musings on backwards compatibility)

Software packages have version numbers. Thinking about them from scratch, the first thing we might want from version numbers is to know if two pieces of software are the same, we could accomplish this by making version numbers into an opaque value, like a UUID. Of course, a UUID isn’t a very useful version number because in practice we also want to do things like order versions, to know which is newer....

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