Understanding OliveTin 2k vs 3k

Users who are upgrading are encouraged to try OliveTin 3k, but understand that it represents several major technology changes, so subtle things might change or break in the first few releases. The objective is to maintain as much compatibility as is pragmatically possible, and highlight any breaking changes clearly.

The main reason for OliveTin 3k is to allow for major technology changes inside the project that enable new features at a later date.

The original version of OliveTin was released in May 2021, and it used a versioning system called calver (Calendar Versioning). For those of you unfamiliar with the calver standard, it means that instead of using 1.0.0 as the first version, the first version was actually called 2021-05-19. One of the benefits of this approach is that you can determine how old the version is just by looking at the version number alone. Unfortunately this is the only real benefit.

However, this worked just fine for a while, but as OliveTin grew, it became clearer that most packaging systems and users were more accustomed to the more traditional semver (Semantic Versioning) system. As a stopgap measure, OliveTin switched the format of it’s versioning to use dots (".") instead of dashes ("-") in an attempt to make it look more like a traditional semver version. This resulted in a change with version 2022.11.11 (November 11th, 2022 - what a cool date!).

As OliveTin continued to mature, and more features were added, it became clear that there were some major architecture and library choices that were no longer ideal. Switching these out (like the configuration library, Viper), is a really major change, and isn’t something that is good to do without a lot of users being very aware of it. In May 2025, a proposal was launched to switch OliveTin to a more traditional semver versioning system. You can view the detail of that proposal here: https://github.com/OliveTin/OliveTin/discussions/591

In short, the benefits of switching to semver are;

This proposal seemed to be positively received by the community, and so the James (founder) decided to move forward with the change.

OliveTin 2k has the following technology choices which limited it’s potential for stability, maintainability and growth;

If you look through the original proposal, it was to create a new package called "OliveTin-semver", and start the versioning at 1.0.0. However, after some more thought, it was decided that this would actually create a lot of confusion, as users would have to figure out if they were using "OliveTin" or "OliveTin-semver" - and it duplicates the package in in places like Linux distributions, which is not a good idea.

However, starting with version "2.0.0" after versions like "2022.11.11" would break the logic of lots of update tools and scripts that people use. This is because major version "2" is below "2022", and so the version ordering, and logic would always think that version 2022.x.x is newer than 2.x.x. This would be very confusing for users, and would likely lead to people not updating, or even downgrading by mistake.

To avoid this confusion, it was decided to jump straight to version "3000.0.0" - which is clearly above "2022.11.11" and any other 2k version. This way, users can easily see that 3000.x.x is newer than any 2k version, and it avoids any confusion with version ordering.

Users are encouraged to try OliveTin 3k, but understand that it represents several major technology changes, so subtle things might change or break in the first few releases. Please remember that OliveTin 2k will continue to be supported and receive updates until at least 31st December 2028, so there is no rush to upgrade.

The developers of this project have quite a lot of test infrastructure around OliveTin 3k (more than was possible with 2k), and would like to strongly urge problems with updates to be reported, so that they can be fixed when possible.