what does “+incompatible” suffix mean in Go github versions?

Question

I am considering upgrading go-github from v17.0.0+incompatible to v28

I notice some versions that go-github released has a +incompatible suffix, especially for the v1 category. What does that entail? I am guessing version with +incompatible are incompatible with the newer/older version?

In general, when updating a third party dependency, how can I know if upgrading to the newer version is safe? Do I just have to read through the change logs?

Answer 1

Go in general does not want you to use the same import path for multiple incompatible versions of a project. This is so that one dependency can use one major version of a module and another dependency can use another.

This syntax indicates that the repository is not using a suffix for their module paths for a non-v0, non-v1 version, and bypasses the logic in the module code that does semantic import versioning. The documentation about this functionality is available on the Go website .

Since going from one major version to another is a breaking change in semantic versioning, you'll need to determine out of band whether or not they're compatible. The +incompatible suffix doesn't implicitly denote this, but going from v17 to v28 does. So changelogs might be a good idea, or you could just update and run your tests if you're confident in your testsuite.