[Fnoord]

Imagine a world where every library and every package has their release date as their version. You'd instantly know which software lacks maintenance or updates (bitrot).

To me it seems more attractive than how Nix does it, but I guess they considered such and saw conflicts, therefore went with hashes.

[tremon]

Would you also instantly know if 20250110 is a drop-in replacement for 20240930 or will it require changes in your code to make it work?

[viraptor]

How do you know if 12345 is a patch for 432 released years ago or a major upgrade from 12344 released a moment ago? Pure time versioning doesn't work with multiple release streams.

[Fnoord]

Thanks for proving me wrong!

[porridgeraisin]

IIRC GNU Parallel versions by date.

Recently in the python ecosystem the `uv` package manager let's you install a package as it was on a certain date. Additionally, you can "freeze" your dependencies to a certain date in pyproject.toml. So when someone clones it and installs dependencies it will install it at the date you've chosen to freeze it at.

Personally I love this method much more than versioning.

I think versioning is mostly useful to just talk about software and maybe major major additions/changes e.g io-uring shipping with linux mainline.

[jimmaswell]

On the opposite side of the world in Gentoo, we compile updates to libraries and applications together on a rolling basis all the time, and it generally works out while letting us have everything as bleeding edge as we want it.

[the_gipsy]

There's software that is done and doesn't need constant updates.

[majewsky]

Yes, but if statically linked, this excludes all software that relies on security-relevant libraries (e.g. cryptography) or receives data from the network. I struggle to think of a lot of software that would qualify beyond coreutils and friends.

[the_gipsy]

The interesting case here is dynamically linked software that doesn't need updates.