What does the build number mean?

tomoki

What does the build number “9.12.3.16” mean?
Is this following recognition correct?

9: Fundamental system changes
12: There is no system change, but function improvement or new function addition, etc.
3: Addition / modification of API
16: Number of program changes

In that case, should I think that the custom rule needs attention because the API is changed when the number 3 is changed?

lasse.lindqvist

So the last number is just an internal build number and means nothing (16 here) for users. Mac and Windows and MSI versions could possibly have different build number here.

The third number (3 here) is usually bumped when small monthly updates are released. No API breakage would happen here.

Second number could be bumped when something bigger happens. The last example of this is the release of BCF Live Connector in 9.12.0. No API breakage would happen here, but something that was deprecated a long time ago might get removed from the API requiring API resources to be recompiled and repackaged.

First number changing is quite rare, but it would indicate a big break in compatibility. It has been maybe a decade since the first number was something other than 9?

But when it comes to the API, something might “break” from users perspective in smaller releases, but we aim to prevent that from happening. Most breakages currently would happen if we update the Solibri-provided dependencies such as Apache POI (for Excel file handling) and the user-added API extension would have been using this implicitly.

In many releases something major might happen in the software itself, but API wouldn’t have any major changes, or the other way around, a lot of additions to the APIs, but no major normal usage changes. For example 9.12.0 (https://www.solibri.com/news/solibri-9-12-0-release-notes) updated the runtime to Java 11, which matters to developers, but not to normal users. Custom views, which are a major developer feature, instead were introduced in 9.10.8 which was not a big release for normal usage. (They did mature in 9.12.0). And custom informations, also a big developer feature, were also added in a smaller release, 9.10.6.

lasse.lindqvist

About custom rules specifically: There hasn’t been any releases recently that would require redoing the rules, and we do not currently expect to release anything that would cause such things, even if version numbers would be bumped.

As a sidenote:
9.10.6 added ConcurrentRule as an alternative to OneByOneRule and it might make sense to start extending that if you want to get performance improvements for your rule.

tomoki

@lasse-lindqvist
Thank you for your reply. I understood the meaning of it!