Re:How the Fuck Did We Get Here?
by slowmovintarget on Friday April 07, 2023 @06:28PM
(#35487866)
We're getting downvoted, not because we're wrong, but because SemVer doesn't deliver in practice what the documentation claims it provides on paper.
What it actually delivers:
- 1.2.changed -> don't care
- 1.changed.0 -> don't care (at least I'm not supposed to have to care)
- changed.0.0 -> you're screwed (maybe, on you to check)
SemVer is an agreed upon way to ship breakage.
That was very much not the default expectation; expecting that things wouldn't break would mean you could update with no oversight, and I don't know a time when that was ever expected.
Things broke all the time, the default expectation was that _something_ would need work, it was just a matter of how much. Semantic Versioning just gives us a framework to (try) to know in advance how much work it would be.
Semantic versioning said to stop basing version numbers on what version of the software you're talking about, and instead use them to indicate that you just broke everything. This only makes sense if it becomes OK to break things. That was an assumption that semantic versioning brought us.