Hynek Schlawack

Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You

Screenshot of “Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You”

As a maintainer of several open source projects (both in Ruby and JavaScript), I agree with everything Hynek says about the difficulty for a maintainer to define versions and give a hint about potential compatibility issues.

even if the maintainer is pure of heart, extremely diligent, and super conservative with what constitutes a breaking change, it is impossible to predict the ways a change can affect your users.

I still find semver better than calver, both as a maintainer and a user, and as Hynek says:

If you’re a maintainer and you like SemVer as an extra service to your users: go wild! I’m not here to tell you how to spend your time. There is value to adding semantic meaning to versions.