Packages

A package is a piece of software you release. It has a single version number, though that version number can be in many places. For example, Knope is a package, which at the time of writing has the version number 0.13.0 in a single file, Cargo.toml. To release Knope on NPM as well, we’d add a package.json file with the same version number.

To split out some of Knope’s functionality into a Rust crate that others could consume, say knope-changelogs, that crate would be a separate package with its own version number.

To decide whether two versioned files are part of one package or if they should be separate packages, ask yourself whether every change that affects one always affects both.

Version

The current version of the package is the version number in all versioned files. If there is any inconsistency, that’s an error. If there are no versioned files, the package’s version is the last release’s Git tag. If there also is no valid Git tag, the package doesn’t have a version (which could be an error sometimes).