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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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