[burntsushi]

Did you do what I asked and look at ripgrep's changelog?[1] The breaking changes are prominently advertised in each major release. Not all breaking changes are the same or have the same impact. Some major releases don't even have any breaking changes. (semver doesn't say to only do a major release when there's a breaking change. You can do a major release without breaking changes.)

I don't think you're correct about "old Unix software" using major version bumps to indicate compatibility breaks. Recent 3.x releases of GNU grep, for example, fucked around with the meaning of \d when using the -P flag. With no changes to the major version number. Did that break your scripts?

The thing about semver is that it tends to make breaking changes much more visible, which is kind of the point. And of course, when you compare it to projects that don't use semver and don't increment the major version for every breaking change, the projects using semver look like they're moving at a much faster pace. It might be true, but you can't conclude it by looking at version numbers when the projects aren't using the same versioning scheme.

[1]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/CHANGELOG....