This was a waste of my time to read.
Freezing the first version of an API forever and ever is how you wind up with software with bugs that can never get fixed.
Semantic versioning is a mistake
11–13 of 13 posts
Re: Semantic versioning is a mistake
#12This was a waste of my time to read. Freezing the first version of an API forever and ever is how you wind up with software with bugs that can never get fixed.
"bugs that can never get fixed"
means
"Features that can never change"
Re: Semantic versioning is a mistake
#13> Here’s the problem: people interpret SemVer as permission to make breaking changes. So, it isn't SemVer that is a mistake. It's the author's opinion that software should always be fully backwards-compatible, which would then require all SemVer-using software to be version 1.x.x (or 0.x.x, if we're zero-indexing.) Or, alternatively, if SemVer didn't exist, this post would probably skip it altogether and just complai…
I agree. SemVer doesn't give you permission to make breaking changes -- it documents your decisions, assuming you're honest with SemVer.
This is very very useful. You can look at a library or dependency and weigh out if frequent, breaking changes are ok for you or not -- is the value worth the pain? Alternatively, if the major version never changes, you can have more confidence that you won't have to rework your code on every library update.