Question: premake5 or just plain premake?

[jjatria]

I recently came across premake while trying to build a project I am not at all involved with. In doing so, I realised that the binary for premake is called premake5 or premake4, instead of plain premake. Am I to take from this that the two versions are incompatible?

Obviously, a project that uses features from version 5 would not be buildable with version 4. But is there any guarantee that projects that were configured to use premake4 will remain buildable with version 5, or 6, or whatever comes next? *

Background

I came across this question while writing a Perl module to install premake and wondering if I should name the module Alien::premake or Alien::premake5 (the Alien:: family of modules installs packages or libraries that are alien to Perl).

If future versions are supposed to be backwards compatible, then I'd think plain premake is better. But if different versions break that, then that would not work. What do you think?

Thank you for the help, and apologies if this is not the right place to ask.

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* Perhaps... 7? 😮

[starkos]

is there any guarantee that projects that were configured to use premake4 will remain buildable with version 5, or 6, or whatever comes next?

No, there is no guarantee, though we do our best.

[jjatria]

Thanks!