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Comment by NetOpWibby | Hacker News Reader

Wild, seeing SemVer actually used properly.

You don't need to do a new release for every checkin. You can make a series of breaking changes and only then declare a new release, bumping the version number.

After all, it took (at least) 21 years to get from 0 to 3.0.0

There's absolutely no reason for 2 major bumps 11 days apart.

> You can make a series of breaking changes and only then declare a new release

That means you need to postpone the breaking changes for a while, kind of bunching them together. Many projects do that, but it also incurs some cost.

> After all, it took (at least) 21 years to get from 0 to 3.0.0

It's possible that they did not implement semantic changes in the strict sense before and included small breaking changes into non-major releases (I think a lot of software does this). Fast changes of version numbers may just mean they started reflecting each small BC break into the version number.

Right, we are witnessing a project switch to semantic versioning that did not have it before.

I don't know when semantic versioning was invented, but it only became prominent in the last decade. Graphviz is from the 90s.

Graphviz is from earlier than that -- mid to late '80s, I'd say. The first paper appeared in Software Practice and Experience in 1988.

If you’re doing CI/CD, though, you should expect this kind of thing. I do appreciate that maybe there could be a throttle for major bumps.

If you're doing CI/CD and pulling from head rather than official published versions, you deserve what you get. If you mean the graphviz project itself, version numbers are meaningless to it internally.

The thing is, if you're writing software with a lot of breaking changes, SemVer doesn't make much sense, because you'll just quickly get to major version numbers in the hundreds.

> The thing is, if you're writing software with a lot of breaking changes, SemVer doesn't make much sense, because you'll just quickly get to major version numbers in the hundreds

“The version number conveys whether there is a breaking change” seems more important than “the version number remains small”, so while the second half may be true, I don’t see how that supports the first half at all.

The problem isn't that it's small, the problem is that if few changes are breaking, then you have "version 5" which is significantly different than "version 4".

Is version 465 very different from version 464 though?

/me points at Firefox

A bit unfair, no? Firefox switched to the "new major version every 6 weeks (or so)" only because Google did that first with Chrome, and people started thinking "Chrome is so much better because it's in version 17 and Firefox is version 3".

> Is version 465 very different from version 464 though?

As soon as: a) you precisely define "very different" AND b) versions 464 and 465 of Firefox and Chrome are available, we can continue discussing :)

Especially when the API surface area is as gigantic as graphviz's.

Still, it's great to see new maintainers with bold ideas.

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