Remove patch version from NodeJS versions

[queengooborg]

What would you like to see added to BCD?

In #18737, the author commented that "12.6.0" is technically inaccurate because the feature was added in NodeJS 12.6.2. (NodeJS, if you're reading this, adding a feature in a patch version is against SemVer policies...) This got me thinking: why do we include patch versions for each NodeJS version? I think it would be better to simply remove the appended ".0" to the NodeJS versions.

How impactful do you think this enhancement will be?

I think that this will help reduce potential confusion with NodeJS versions. Additionally, this help reduce liability if a feature was added in a later patch version (which again, is against SemVer policies and shouldn't have happened in the first place).

Do you have anything more you want to share?

No response

[Elchi3]

Here's how the nodejs docs call their versions. Maybe we should switch to that?

[caugner]

I'm in favor of removing patch versions from NodeJS versions, but I would suggest to treat 12.6 as a short-hand for 12.6.0, so if a feature was added in 12.6.2, we should use 12.7 instead.

[queengooborg]

I don't think that 12.6.2 should become 12.7; I think it should remain 12.6.0. In the guidelines for choosing a version number, we state that patch version numbers are simply dropped.

[caugner]

But isn't this about backporting? https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data/blob/main/docs/data-guidelines/index.md#backported-releases says the opposite. Something implemented in Safari 4.1 gets set as Safari 5.0.

[queengooborg]

That section was written because Safari created a few releases where they backported almost all of the features from a newer version to older ones for compatibility with older macOS versions -- so they took Safari 5.0 and released it as 4.1 as well, containing nearly all the same versions. They did the same for Safari
8.0 to 6.2. Backported features, on the other hand, are generally okay for NodeJS since it does it so commonly and its versioning is non-sequential.

The part I'm referring to is in the summary of the choosing a version number section: "Likewise, if a feature was not available in Safari 10.1.1, but added in Safari 10.1.3, then the supported version is 10.1."