SemVer Debate

Discussions center on Semantic Versioning (SemVer) principles, particularly whether projects follow it correctly, the role of major version bumps for breaking changes, and criticisms or defenses of SemVer practices.

📉 Falling 0.3x Open Source
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Keywords

GP OSS CI youtube.com SEMVER OS SemVer API semver.org GUI semver major version breaking version breaking changes major versioning changes semantic minor

Sample Comments

draw_down Oct 7, 2015 View on HN

Is it a semver project? Doesn't seem like one, the whole idea is to raise major version when you break compatibility.

bastawhiz Oct 4, 2023 View on HN

Semver is hardly just major version numbers.

makkesk8 Mar 3, 2023 View on HN

That's what semantic versioning is for, breaking changes are inherently allowed in major version bumps.

slver Jun 28, 2021 View on HN

SemVer is an impediment only if you insist to make it so.

OJFord Nov 19, 2023 View on HN

That's not what they do, in semver terms you get breaking changes in minor version bumps.To be fair, as a result there's maybe more resistance to making any such change than there otherwise would be, but in nicher standard lib modules there are API/semantic changes from one version to another.I'd prefer semver, like it sounds GP would, but failing that I'd prefer totally owning that the version is fairly meaningless, and doing something like 2023.x as pip does for

simiones Nov 21, 2024 View on HN

Semantic versioning does nothing to help here. If you don't realize that people are depending on such a behavior, you won't increment the major version number.

terrajobst Aug 14, 2017 View on HN

It doesn't break sem ver. Sem ver doesn't disallow revving the major number without making a breaking change. It only says if you do a breaking change, you need to rev the major number.

shurcooL Mar 23, 2013 View on HN

What are the reasons not to follow semver today?

outadoc Dec 15, 2021 View on HN

In opposition with SemVer projects, which... ...don't have bugs?

paskozdilar Mar 6, 2022 View on HN

What difference does semver fail to communicate, exactly?