[cookiecaper]

I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think he's saying that semver's system that forces major version bumps for breaking changes is good because it discourages the maintainer from making breaking changes more frequently than he is comfortable releasing a new major version. That is, the effect of getting a maintainer to batch up breaking changes in exchange for version consistency is positive, and thus semver should not be changed as you propose, because it would decrease the cost of releasing a breaking change.

[eridius]

There's still a cost associated to releasing a breaking change, which is users have to manually upgrade, their package manager won't silently upgrade for them. So if I release a breaking change, I know any bugfixes included in it or later builds will take a while before they end up in the hands of users, because most people tend to put off dealing with breaking changes until they have time to actually investigate the changes.

But with my proposal, users can see that the breaking change is a "minor" one, and therefore they don't need to be prepared to learn about a bunch of big changes in order to upgrade.