Managing versions of different dependent products

[iboB]

How do we manage versions? Here's the problem.

Say ac-local is at 1.2.3

Wrappers

What is the version of ac-local-py? Is it 6.7.23? How would one know that this is compatible with ac-local 1.2.3?

It could be 1.2.3.5 where 1.2.3 is the ac-local version, and 5 means fifth revision of the python wrapper for ac-local 1.2.3. This looks nice. It even works with requirements.txt having a line like ac-local-py == 1.2.*. The problem however is twofold:

What if there is a fundamental redesign of the wrapper itself? Versioning this as 1.2.3.6 would imply a small change from 1.2.3.5. Bumping other numbers will negate the wole idea of the first three.

Moreover a given version of the wrapper may be compatible with multiple versions of ac-local. ac-local-py 4.3.1 could work for ac-local 1.0.0 through 1.10.x. If ac-local maintains good backwards compatibility, this is not out of the question. So in this line of thought it makes sense to have ac-local and ac-local-py completely detached.

But this brings us to binary distributions. In a binary distro the ac-local version is completely defined. Even if ac-local-py 4.3.1 as source is compatible with absolutely every ac-local version, a binary distribution will have a specific version of ac-local. Which one is it?

It seems that we need to make one of two mutually exclusive choices:

• ac-local-py 1.2.3.x where only x is the wrapper version. This makes it easy to know and guarantee the unrelying ac-local version through package management, but we sacrifice the wrapper being compatible with multiple versions of ac-local. Even if there are zero changes to the wrapper, there would need to be a version bump to support a given ac-local version
• ac-local-py 3.5.2 where this is a wrapper only version and has nothing (explicitly) to do with ac-local's version. In this case we allow the wrapper to wrap multiple ac-local versions (though which?), but we completely hide the actual version from the user

And this becomes even worse in:

Plugins

The plugins have the exact same issues as above, but they are compound by the fact that they're bound to two sources: ac-local and the inference library.

So how do we even begin to manage the version of a plugin which uses ac-local 1.2.3 and llama.cpp 6.3.1?