[quickthrower2]

I don’t think the proposal helps as it puts more burden on package maintainers (honourable semvar for the whole package is burden enough!).

The problem is in NPM culture, and how much churn there is in packages and especially unnecessary breaking changes.

Avoid that and then the problem is reduced from constantly fighting to play API keepup to simply letting security updates flow through.

Let your patch version number go to the moon (which is no real problem practically, computers do big numbers and it is auto automatable.)

[capableweb]

> The problem is in NPM culture, and how much churn there is in packages and especially unnecessary breaking changes.

This is a human culture problem if anything. Things cannot be left alone and be called "done" anymore, everything has to constantly "improve", breakage be damned. New connectors HAVE to be invented, even though the improvements are marginal, and now everything "old" doesn't work anymore.

How many times haven't you opened up a tool you use daily/weekly and suddenly the UI has shifted in ways so you cannot understand how to do the task you were supposed to do?

With SaaS, this has become much more prevalent than before. And it's not just the "npm culture" or even JavaScript, this exists everywhere in society, from cars to doors to chairs to airplanes and everything in-between. Obviously, some sectors are better with standards than others, but seems to be happening more and more, everywhere.

[Supermancho]

> Things cannot be left alone and be called "done" anymore,

The problem of tracking changes across dependencies exists whether or not this is true. Perhaps the problem is more evident because the feature development and software change processes have become more efficient. eg Detecting the need for changes, new features that are expected to stay competitive, etc. These efficient processes are highlighting this mismatch mitigation, that was easily manageable (or ignored) in the past.

[cassianoleal]

> semvar

It's "semver" (with an "e"), short for Semantic Versioning.

https://semver.org/

[DiggyJohnson]

A semantic variable could be used to modify the way the system interprets shell and environment variables!

You could have different variable semantics for different namespaces or partitions!

:)

[Waterluvian]

I think churn in NPM might be an effect of how quickly the browsers and language are evolving. There’s always some new interface that will make your existing code faster or cleaner.

[dboreham]

My sense it is cultural. If there's no consequence for breaking stuff then stuff gets broken. Other languages have a stronger culture of shame from breaking stuff.

[interactivecode]

Thinking we need to shame our colleagues more is a really bad take. You can like your obscure programming language for all sorts of reasons, but if they go around shaming people I'm not surprised people would rather use a friendlier language.

[toast0]

Well, what other way to influence behavior do we have?

If a dependency update breaks my code, it reduces my opinion of that dependency. But if it's the least-worse option, and it's free, I can't do much other than think negative thoughts.

[kamma4434]

Some, eg Clojure, have a culture of not breaking things. Having a library that remains unchanged for years is just fine.