Go-ethereum has no respect for semantic versioning

[ryanc414]

System information

Geth version: v1.9.23
OS & Version: OSX

Expected behaviour

Patch versions should not introduce breaking changes.

Actual behaviour

Patch versions introduce lots of breaking changes.

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

1. Use go-ethereum v1.9.12
2. Write code that depends on abi.U256()
3. Attempt to upgrade to go-ethereum v1.9.23
4. Find that abi.U256() was removed for no obvious reason: ab72803#diff-baa94fd18f34eadd3684559252ba85328c6da713e079ccc39de383ecbd6950d6L40-L45
5. Find out that a number of your dependencies also depend on abi.U256()

As another example, #21043 changes the behaviour of estimateGas() in a breaking way when a non-zero gasPrice is specified. This should not go in a patch release!

See https://semver.org/ for reference.

[fjl]

First off, sorry for the inconvenience. We will be more careful regarding such API changes in the future.

Please note that certain packages in go-ethereum cannot always remain backwards-compatible because their APIs need to be adapted to changes in the ethereum protocol. This mostly applies to the 'core' package. That said, we do try to maintain compatibility as much as possible. This change in accounts/abi was very unfortunate, and could have been avoided.

[ryanc414]

Thanks. I completely understand that breaking changes are sometimes needed, the important thing is that breaking changes should always lead to a major version bump, that way it is less surprising to developers. Unfortunately, for now I am stuck on v1.9.12 since upgrading will require a long and tedious process of ensuring all my dependencies work with v1.9.23 and re-compiling the contract bindings for v1.9.23, which I do not have time for right now.

Closing since I don't think there is any immediate action go-ethereum devs can take to remedy this situation, just wanted to make you aware.

[silasdavis]

Given it contains protocol hard fork changes, why is this also a patch release: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/releases/tag/v1.10.5 ?

[holiman]

That's Ethereum itself undergoing a version change. Geth does not break api compatibility in a backward incompatible way.Semantic versioning works great for an API or library or utility, less so for something that's all those and more.