[beart]

The article is wrong about reverts (in my opinion). If a breaking change is introduced, and then removed, the removal should also most likely be considered a breaking change (both the addition and removal are changing your API). So it is correct that a major version bump should occur when reverting. Once a package has been published, the ship has sailed.

[layer8]

The issue is that if there was no release in between, or only a beta or similar, you now have two breaking changes indicated by the commits, although in sum there is none since the last official release.

[beart]

That's true, but depends on your workflow and release strategy.

If you are releasing upon every push to main/master (following what semantic release and conventional commits provides you in terms of automation), then it makes sense to perform major version bumps for the reverts.

If you have a manual release strategy, then it might not make sense to use these tools in the way they have been designed.

[layer8]

If you have actual dependents in a SemVer fashion, then this isn’t useful for those still on the prior version. What you’d rather do is decrement the major version again because it’s compatible with the prior version again. Those dependents who already upgraded to the interim version have to consider another breaking change regardless.

And if you don’t have these kinds of dependents, then the versioning scheme isn’t important anyway.

[claytonjy]

release-please[0] allows you to do a manual version override in a commit, which would allow you to decrement the major version upon reverting a breaking change

I think that could be simplified, so the tool can tell that a commit is reverting a breaking change and thus the version should be decremented, but at least there's an escape hatch.

[0]: https://github.com/googleapis/release-please