I agree this is getting a bit too complicated, I feel like everyone here understands versions as does the wider community. Why not just start there and add other techniques if that fails to work properly or be effective for communication.
I think we are better of just choosing something simple and going forward rather than deliberating, the worst thing that happens is that we have to make a different choice later. I’m not sure that’s worse than sitting on what we currently have and not being able to make progress on new encodings or footers. On Mon, Jun 15, 2026 at 3:28 AM Micah Kornfield <[email protected]> wrote: > Thank you for the feedback Andrew. Practically speaking, I wonder if we > should have two separate notions of feature bundling: > > 1. Specification version (this would be primary and risks using features > that aren't widely adopted). > 2. Presets - Gives users a different way of configuring things that allows > for better guarantees about compatibility in the ecosystem. > > > > On Friday, June 12, 2026, Andrew Bell <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hi, > > > > This discussion and the proposals seem to have gotten very complicated. > > People not on this mailing list or not doing regular development on > Parquet > > would probably benefit from simplicity. Most people are used to version > > numbers without worrying about various types of compatibility -- readers > > can simply state "I can read version 3-7", for example. Users understand > > this. People writing files can also easily understand "I want to write a > > version 6 file because version 6 supports feature X that I want." or "I > > want to write version 7 because it's the latest version." > > > > I don't really care about the details of a solution, but please keep in > > mind that a more simple solution probably increases accessibility for the > > widest range of people. > > > > -- > > Andrew Bell > > [email protected] > > >
