[eridius]

But it does communicate something useful! It tells you "this isn't a huge change, it's a minor change that just happens to break backwards-compatibility in some fashion". Most products reserve major version number changes for when there's particularly large or important changes to the product. Committing to semantic versioning means losing that. The upside is your package manager knows when it's safe to silently upgrade. The downside is the actual humans looking at your product have no idea which versions they need to actually do some work to support, versus which ones just have minor breaking changes that may not even affect them.

[eropple]

Let me try this a different way:

I expect to audit dependencies I use when they break API compatibility in any way. That's a feature, not a bug. Having a "well, the maintainer think this is a bigger break" number does nothing. It's still a break. It's still a major version change.