[bryanlarsen]

> if you do want to have a breaking new version, what exactly do you do?

You change the name. Like "Raku" instead of "Perl6". Once you've reached a certain level of stability and usage, any substantial breaking change is going to inevitably result in a fork, so embracing that up front is going to result in a much better experience.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

Yeah, I like Rich Hickey’s critique of semantic versioning. Major version changes just overload the name and cause confusion: if you must break compatibility, fork and rename.