[DEADB17]

I don't know about maven, but in NPM you can keep both. If you take away the limits of a particular implementation, I think that semantic versioning is a useful convention for the producer of an artifact to convey intent to the consumers.

[taeric]

That is the point. It doesn't convey intent. Outside of the "major versions could break." Which is somewhat worthless.

Consider, you are using a library that expose ten objects and functions. It is on version 1.2.8. it upgrades to 1.2.9. What do you do? You take the upgrade. Usually no questions asked.

It upgrades to 1.3.0, but only to add an eleventh function. What do you do? Probably take it, because you don't want to be behind.

It upgrades to 2.0. reason is "things have changed.". However, they kept the same function names. You think you can make the upgrade fine. Because, well they have the same names. However, you can't know, because some body thought it wise to reverse arguments of some functions. Which thankfully, is a compile time fail. What else changed, though?

[DEADB17]

Sorry @taeric, I can't reply to your post directly.

I do think that the intent of the producer is being communicated (unsafe to upgrade, safe to upgrade with new features, safe + automatic improvements).

I'm not disagreeing that "spec" adding more metadata to have better granularity and potentially reducing the amount of manual work is a good thing. But in the absence of it, "semantic versioning" is an improvement over safe and unsafe versions being indistinguishable.

[taeric]

No worries. In the future, you can almost always get a reply button by clicking directly on a post. (Click on the "time since post" to get to the direct link.)

I think I see the point. Yes, he is using hyperbole. However, I have found it is more accurate than not. In particular, the point that many projects feel a lot more cavalier about doing breaking changes.