{"id":28003,"date":"2017-09-13T09:08:14","date_gmt":"2017-09-13T07:08:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/?p=28003"},"modified":"2019-02-19T12:57:11","modified_gmt":"2019-02-19T10:57:11","slug":"on-semantic-versioning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mamchenkov.net\/wordpress\/2017\/09\/13\/on-semantic-versioning\/","title":{"rendered":"On Semantic Versioning"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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First of all, you should know that versioning is important<\/a>.\u00a0 Even the worst versioning practices provide more value than no versioning at all.\u00a0 At work<\/a>, we are big fans of the Semantic Versioning<\/a>, and we use it for all our projects, plugins, and libraries.\u00a0 And I think, you should do too.<\/p>\n

In general, Semantic Versioning works great for us.\u00a0 But there were a few bumps recently, with more and more libraries dropping support for PHP 5.6 and requiring PHP 7.\u00a0 I can’t blame them – after all PHP 5.6 has reached its end of life<\/a> quite a while ago.<\/p>\n

It’s not what the maintainers do, but how they do it that I have an issue with.\u00a0 I’ve been thinking about writing a blog post on the subject for a few month now.\u00a0 Never got to it.\u00a0 And yesterday I came across this blog post<\/a> by Paul Jones<\/a>, which is so much better than whatever I was about to say.\u00a0 Paul explains the problem in detail and suggests the “System” addendum to Semantic Versioning:<\/p>\n

I opine that requiring a change in the public environment into which a package is installed is just as major an incompatibility as introducing a breaking change to the public API of the package. To cover that case, I offer the following as a draft addendum to the SemVer spec:<\/p>\n